Book Image

Troubleshooting OpenVPN

By : Eric F Crist
Book Image

Troubleshooting OpenVPN

By: Eric F Crist

Overview of this book

OpenVPN, the most widely used open source VPN package, allows you to create a secure network across systems, keeping your private data secure. Connectivity and other issues are a pain to deal with, especially if they are impacting your business. This book will help you resolve the issues faced by OpenVPN users and teach the techniques on how to troubleshoot it like a true expert. This book is a one stop solution for troubleshooting any issue related to OpenVPN. We will start by introducing you to troubleshooting techniques such as Packet Sniffing, Log Parsing, and OpenSSL. You will see how to overcome operating system specific errors. Later on, you will get to know about network and routing errors by exploring the concepts of IPv4 and IPv6 networking issues. You will discover how to overcome these issues to improve the performance of your OpenVPN deployment. By the end of the book, you will know the best practices, tips, and tricks to ensure the smooth running of your OpenVPN.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Alternative clients


From an open source project perspective, the only supported application is a build of the open source project code. In practice, however, there are a multitude of exceedingly useful alternative builds. Some of these builds are for commercial VPN providers, and support not just the OpenVPN protocol, but may include support for PPTP, IPSec, or AnyConnect, or any other protocol. These applications usually provide a single, simple, user interface, and couple with a custom configuration provided by the author or provider.

Because of the added features or controls that may be built into the third-party application, it's likely easiest to troubleshoot a non-working OpenVPN connection by reverting back to the open source client. This helps to rule out the additional features.

There are a few circumstances where an official application does not exactly exist. Mobile platforms, for instance, do not have a native OpenVPN open source build. The Android OpenVPN client, while using the...