Book Image

OpenVPN Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Jan Just Keijser
Book Image

OpenVPN Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Jan Just Keijser

Overview of this book

OpenVPN provides an extensible VPN framework that has been designed to ease site-specific customization, such as providing the capability to distribute a customized installation package to clients, and supporting alternative authentication methods via OpenVPN’s plugin module interface. This book provides you with many different recipes to help you set up, monitor, and troubleshoot an OpenVPN network. You will learn to configure a scalable, load-balanced VPN server farm that can handle thousands of dynamic connections from incoming VPN clients. You will also get to grips with the encryption, authentication, security, extensibility, and certifications features of OpenSSL. You will also get an understanding of IPv6 support and will get a demonstration of how to establish a connection via IPv64. This book will explore all the advanced features of OpenVPN and even some undocumented options, covering all the common network setups such as point-to-point networks and multi-client TUN-style and TAP-style networks. Finally, you will learn to manage, secure, and troubleshoot your virtual private networks using OpenVPN 2.4.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
OpenVPN Cookbook - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Failure when redirecting the default gateway


In this recipe, we will troubleshoot an infrequent yet very persistent issue that can occur when setting up a VPN connection. When the redirect-gateway directive is used to redirect the default gateway on an OpenVPN client, it sometimes causes the client to lose all the Internet connections. This particularly occurs when the client machine on which OpenVPN is running is connected to the rest of the network or with the Internet using a PPP-based connection, such as PPPoE or PPPoA, especially, when using a GPRS/UMTS connections via a mobile phone.

When this occurs, OpenVPN sometimes is not capable of determining the default gateway before it is redirected. After the default gateway is redirected to the OpenVPN tunnel, the whole tunnel collapses on itself, as all the traffic, including the encrypted tunnel traffic itself, is redirected into the tunnel, causing the VPN to lock up.

This recipe will show how to detect this situation and what can be done...