As a follow-up to the previous recipe, where a plain HTTP proxy was used to connect to an OpenVPN server, we will show in this recipe how an OpenVPN connection can be set up when the HTTP proxy server requires authentication.
The HTTP proxy used in this recipe is a Linux-based Apache httpd server with the mod_proxy module loaded and configured for Basic authentication.
We use the following network layout:
Set up the client and server certificates using the first recipe from Chapter 2, Client-server IP-only Networks. For this recipe, the server computer was running CentOS 5 Linux and OpenVPN 2.1.1. The client was running Fedora 13 Linux and OpenVPN 2.1.1. Keep the configuration file example9-7-server.conf from the Chapter 9's recipe Tuning TCP-based connections at hand, as well as the client configuration file example9-7.ovpn from the same recipe.