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

The Project Community


OpenVPN project has its own website, including downloads of new versions and updates, documentation, howtos, mailing lists, and links to various VPN-related pages. A project page can hardly be better than that of OpenVPN. You'll find it at http://openvpn.net/.

The most important source of help is the mailing lists: http://openvpn.net/mail.html.

Since we are using SSL/TLS for encryption purposes, you certainly want to understand this toolkit. The SSL/TLS Cryptographic libraries website provides detailed documentation and mailing lists, which can be found at http://www.openssl.org/.

The website of the TLS Charter by the TLS Working Group provides a list with many related RFCs and Internet drafts you might consider helpful: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/tls-charter.html.

The Universal TUN/TAP driver can be downloaded from the following page: http://vtun.sourceforge.net/tun/. Nevertheless, this should not be necessary, since every modern distribution (and kernel) should...