There are various pages that advise on setting up an Open VPN Server on Amazon EC2, but all I need is to setup a client (so any internet access is routed through the VPN rather than coming directly from AWS IPs). I can transfer the .ovpn file to it and start it with
openvpn --config client.ovpn
But as soon as I do this I lose my ssh connection and therefore cant do anything with it. Googled extensively and found various suggestions that claim to bypass either certain ports or certain IP addresses. Either would be fine, i.e. I am happy to be restricted to certain IPs to connect via ssh when its running.
However, none of these seem to work in Amazons environment, e.g. see OpenVPN client on Amazon EC2. Its a new instance, so sits in VPC if this helps.
Best Answer
In my case, executing the following successfully started the openvpn connection without losing ssh functionality:
Example
where the ip following
hostis our office network's public IP (you can get this by just typing "what's my ip" into Google on your own pc) and the ip followinggwis the ec2 instance's gateway IP (seen on the first line, second column of the output ofnetstat -anrwhen you execute it on your AWS server).Checking the reported public ip before and after executing the above showed that it had changed from reporting as our normal IP address to reporting as the IP address of the VPN server.
Some more background information can be found here: Prevent SSH connection lost after logging into VPN on server machine