Book Image

OpenVPN: Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks

Book Image

OpenVPN: Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks

Overview of this book

OpenVPN is a powerful, open source SSL VPN application. It can secure site-to-site connections, WiFi and enterprise-scale remote connections. While being a full-featured VPN solution, OpenVPN is easy to use and does not suffer from the complexity that characterizes other IPSec VPN implementations. It uses the secure and stable TLS/SSL mechanisms for authentication and encryption. This book is an easy introduction to this popular VPN application. After introducing the basics of security and VPN, the book moves on to cover using OpenVPN, from installing it on various platforms, through configuring basic tunnels, to more advanced features, such as using the application with firewalls, routers, proxy servers, and OpenVPN scripting. While providing only necessary theoretical background, the book takes a practical approach, presenting plenty of examples.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
OpenVPN
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Securing and Stabilizing OpenVPN


Up to now, we have built several tunnels and all of them were built with simple mechanisms and focused on simplicity. In this chapter, we will set up an OpenVPN server and tunnels that can be used in a production environment. For this purpose we will use strong encryption layers, which OpenVPN offers, and set some parameters in our config file to make sure that OpenVPN keeps running. This will be our first task.

Here is a configuration file for our VPN server for enabling access only for one client. Perhaps it's a good idea that you have a look at the following options and parameters before you read on. This is far from perfect, especially because there is a constant development concerning security going on and hence I do not try to give an example with the highest possible security. Nevertheless, there are some features enabled in this configuration that have proven very helpful:

float
dev tunVPN0
tun-mtu 1500
ifconfig 10.179.10.1 10.179.10.2
port 5000
route...