The next few sections illustrate some advanced configuration options. It is suggested you fully understands the impact to their network before deploying these in a production environment. These options are rarely used, but can be extremely beneficial in the right circumstances.
It is often desirable to make VPN clients appear as if they are part of the server-side network. This makes it easier to browse folders and share files and printers. To achieve this purpose, many setups resort to Ethernet bridging (see Chapter 6, Client/Server Mode with tap Devices), which has its own drawbacks. The performance of a bridged configuration can be much lower compared to a nonbridged setup.
When the OpenVPN server runs on Linux or Unix, there is an alternative solution: most Unix kernels have Proxy ARP capabilities, which can be used to assign an OpenVPN client with an IP address on the server-side LAN, and make it appear as if it is part of that LAN. Note that this...