Turn on/off OpenVPN tunnel from a webpage

Question

As I don't live in a country where Netflix is available, I bought an OpenVPN access and mounted a tunnel in a Raspberry Pi and configured it to act as a router for my Apple TV.

This configuration works but it also means that I have to keep the tunnel up all the time...

I was thinking about a webpage running on the PI to check the tunnel status and a button to mount or to unmount it.

Have you ever seen that kind app ?

Would it be complicated to check the tunnel status with a PHP script? Mounting or dismounting it would be easy with system commands but checking the status look more complicated for me...

Any idea?

Thanks

Answer 1

And you can always use a tool like webmin to manage RPI(and any Linux) via browser, including openvpn service. There are plenty of detailed guides on how to install it on RPI, the gist is:

apt-get install -y perl libnet-ssleay-perl openssl libauthen-pam-perl libpam-runtime libio-pty-perl apt-show-versions python wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin_1.660_all.deb dpkg --install webmin_1.660_all.deb

PS: It should be easy to write a cgi script that wraps around "service openvpn status", "service openvpn start" and "service openvpn stop" in any language, especially if you don't care much about permissions "at home"