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.
Set up the client and server certificates using the first recipe from Chapter 2, Client-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.