OpenVPN supports on-the-fly compression of the traffic that is sent over the VPN tunnel. This can improve the performance over a slow network line, but it does add a little overhead. When transferring uncompressible data (such as ZIP files), the performance actually decreases slightly.
If the compression is enabled on the server but not on the client, then the VPN connection will fail.
Install OpenVPN 2.0 or higher on two computers. Make sure the computers are connected over a network. 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 5 Linux and OpenVPN 2.1.1. The client was running Fedora 13 Linux and OpenVPN 2.1.1. Keep the configuration file, basic-udp-server.conf, from the Chapter 2 recipe Server-side routing at hand, as well as the client configuration file basic-udp-client.conf.