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)

Narrowing the focus


When your VPN fails to work the way it was expected, it's best to narrow down the cause of the problem. In the simplest case, a VPN is used by a client wanting to talk to a resource that exists on the VPN. Having a diagram or flow chart of your finished VPN topology, including the VPN, the server-side LAN, and resources that will be exposed to the clients, will help rule out working components.

Here is a sample network diagram depicting a simple corporate network with an OpenVPN server. There are a number of internal components that are inaccessible to the general Internet, an application server, and an internal website. Externally accessible are a public website, the corporate e-mail server, and the OpenVPN server.

The dotted lines show our protected or internal traffic, and the solid lines show general Internet routed traffic:

Example network diagram used in scenario 1 and 2

Sample scenarios

The utility of the diagram mentioned earlier are best demonstrated with some useful...