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

Prerequisites


Some prerequisites have to be fulfilled if you want to install OpenVPN on your system. Windows users must use Windows 2000 or XP; Mac OS X is required on Apple platforms. This is all that is required for these operating systems, but Linux/UNIX systems must meet the following demands:

  • Your system must provide support for the Universal TUN/TAP driver:

    The kernels newer than version 2.4 of almost all modern Linux distributions provide support for TUN/TAP devices. Only if you are using an old distribution or if you have built your own kernel, will you have to add this support to your configuration. The section of this chapter Enabling Linux Kernel Support for TUN/TAP Devices, deals with this problem. This project's website can be found at: http://vtun.sourceforge.net/tun/.

  • OpenSSL Libraries have to be installed on your system:

    I have not encountered modern Linux/UNIX systems that do not meet this requirement. However, if you want to compile OpenVPN from source code, the SSL development...