Super frustrating experience with this product, which exists for one purpose: to run an OpenVPN system so I can access my files from outside my company.

The AX-55 JP router was acting weird, logging me out of the admin every 20 seconds or so, and the device could not connect to the TP Link cloud, so I reset everything, which improved things (the logging out, at least). I am trying to set up OpenVPN but it is not working smoothly at all.

I turned on OpenVPN, generated the certificate, activated the TP Link iD connection, and have what appears to be a working **.tplinkdns.com domain. I can ping that domain inside my network fine, but outside the network, I get "Request timeout for icmp_sec" repeatedly. I thought the domain should be ping-able in order to work?

If I output the .opvn file from the router's admin page, it contains a hard-encoded IP connect to my router internal to my network, which sounds great if my goal was to have a VPN connection from inside my company. Since I need to access my network from the outside, I edit the .opvn file to reflect my **.tplinkdns.com domain, as I've done before when things worked well, but get nothing but timeouts. The .opvn file with the hard-encoded IP address will connect to the VPN from my main Mac if I'm connected directly to the wifi network, showing that it's fundamentally working presumably, but the dynamic DNS will not.

So my questions are, is the inability to ping **.tplinkdns.com from the outside the reason for my OpenDNS issue? 

Since I was having so much problem getting this dynamic DNS to seemingly work, I signed up for NOIP. After finally getting the router to log in to that for dynamic DNS, I output the .opvn file again, and was happy to see that my **.zapto DOT org (set up through NoIp) domain that I just set up was filled in for me already, no need to edit it. That seems good...except that the computer cannot connect to the network. Pinging **.zapto DOT org gives an error, this time saying "no route to hose" in addition to request timeout. 

So, can you please help me debug this frustrating situation? Why doesn't TPlink's own dynamic DNS service work? Was still being bound to my TPlink account the reason why the NO-Ip account wouldn't connect? If I switch back to tplink as my DNS provider and it shows me logged in and has a dynamic DNS displaying, I can use that, right? Why did the no-ip account insert the domain name for me into the .ovpn file, but TPLink's version requires that I edit the hard-encoded IP with my dynamic DNS URL? (Although it doesn't work even after I edit and test it.)

I like TP Link's products in general, except for the minor part of not being able to set up the basic VPN that I needed, and have used successfully in the past. Please give me some advice on how to fix this frustrating issue before I move on to another company's products, which I don't want to do. 

I had difficulty posting this because this community saw the links inside the post as nefarious. Considering it's a place to discuss networking, never embedding a link seems kind of ridiculous.