Book Image

OpenVPN: Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks

Book Image

OpenVPN: Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks

Overview of this book

OpenVPN is a powerful, open source SSL VPN application. It can secure site-to-site connections, WiFi and enterprise-scale remote connections. While being a full-featured VPN solution, OpenVPN is easy to use and does not suffer from the complexity that characterizes other IPSec VPN implementations. It uses the secure and stable TLS/SSL mechanisms for authentication and encryption. This book is an easy introduction to this popular VPN application. After introducing the basics of security and VPN, the book moves on to cover using OpenVPN, from installing it on various platforms, through configuring basic tunnels, to more advanced features, such as using the application with firewalls, routers, proxy servers, and OpenVPN scripting. While providing only necessary theoretical background, the book takes a practical approach, presenting plenty of examples.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
OpenVPN
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Hints to Other Tools


There is an abundance of networking tools concerning monitoring, sniffing, and scanning. Two of my favorites are Cacti and Nagios. Cacti is a monitoring tool similar to Munin, but it seems more powerful. Nagios is a tool designed to monitor machines and services.

With Nagios you can not only determine if a server is still answering pings, but can also check for services by accessing them (using e.g. the samba or HTTP protocols) and trigger actions when the service is not available. You can have your Nagios machine send you an SMS if your OpenVPN tunnel is down, or if the management interface is not reacting.