Hello,

I started following the guide at http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/OpenVPN in order to get OpenVPN working on my new linode VPS. I noticed at the start it talked about two eth interfaces, and upon checking I only had one. No biggie I thought, i'll just bridge the tunnel with eth0 and that will work right? Nope! Thank goodness linode has out of band management :). I'm honestly a little lost reading http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html but from the looks of it I'd be better off using a routed VPN and then turning on IP forwarding on my linode vps?

I'm using bridging without any difficulty. Are you using the "bridge-start" script in openvpn's "sample-scripts" directory?

Yeah, I am. When I bridged to eth0 it stopped accepting any traffic from the outside world (eth0 has my public ip address)..

Edit: All I want to do is vpn into my linode when i'm at public wireless hotspots and browse the Internet etc through it.

Edit Edit: I was using the wrong key file in server.conf

VPN may be overkill for your needs. I thought about doing the same, but figured I'd just use SSH to encrypt network traffic (see this tutorial for Windows, but it's the same on Linux/OS X: http://www.buzzsurf.com/surfatwork/ )

I've also setup my mailserver to support TLS encryption to encrypt communication between my server and my email client (or I just use webmail)

Ahh thanks. I'm also using it for a few other things like SSH/ftp access because I don't want to open those ports to the outside world (even on non-standard ports.)