Why can't I access my droplet after it connects to an openvpn server?

Select Create OpenVPN Access Server Droplet from the menu. Select a plan and datacenter for your droplet on DigitalOcean. Decide on your authentication. Add tags, choose a project, pick any other parameters, and alter the droplet’s hostname if necessary. To create a droplet, click.

When connecting your Droplet to a VPN, it’s common to lose external connectivity if your VPN configuration pushes a default route to the client. This causes all your Droplet’s traffic to be routed through the VPN, affecting your server’s regular connections and services.

To fix this issue, you should configure your OpenVPN server to provide only specific routes to your Droplet. This ensures that your Droplet maintains its connections and services while still accessing the NAS over the VPN.

On your OpenVPN server configuration file, comment out or remove the line “push "redirect-gateway def1"” if it exists. Then, add a line with the specific network route to the NAS, like this:

push “route nas_network_address netmask”

Replace nas_network_address and netmask with appropriate values for your network.

After making these changes, restart your OpenVPN server and reconnect your Droplet to the VPN.

For more information on configuring OpenVPN, you can refer to the following DigitalOcean tutorial: How To Set Up an OpenVPN Server on Ubuntu 20.04.

Hope that this helps!