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

Summary


In this chapter we have set up a secure OpenVPN connection between two partners based on certificates and using strong encryption plus some non-standard security features. In the next step we configured a Debian system with a firewall, which was the Shorewall that offers a nice GUI together with Webmin. A short look at the configuration files of the Shorewall Firewall and possible troubleshooting hints followed before we proceeded with the SuSEfirewall of OpenSuSE. After that we configured two different firewall systems that could connect to each other through the secure OpenVPN tunnel. We looked at iptables, and finally learned how to configure the Windows Firewall on Microsoft Windows XP.