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

Using the status file


OpenVPN offers several options to monitor the clients connected to a server. The most commonly used method is using a status file. This recipe will show how to use and read the OpenVPN status file. We will also focus on some subtleties of the status file in a TAP-style setup.

Getting ready

Set up the client and server certificates using the first recipe from Chapter 2Client-server IP-only Networks. For this recipe, the server computer was running CentOS 6 Linux and OpenVPN 2.3.10. The first client was running Fedora 20 Linux and OpenVPN 2.3.10. The second client was running Windows 7 64 bit and OpenVPN 2.3.10. For the Linux client, keep the client configuration file example3-1-client.conf at hand. For the Windows client, keep the client configuration file example3-2-client2.ovpn at hand.

How to do it...

  1. Create the server configuration file by adding a line to the example3-1-server.conf. file:

            status /var/log/openvpn.status 
    

    Save it as example3-7-server.conf...