Book Image

OpenVPN Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Jan Just Keijser
Book Image

OpenVPN Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Jan Just Keijser

Overview of this book

OpenVPN provides an extensible VPN framework that has been designed to ease site-specific customization, such as providing the capability to distribute a customized installation package to clients, and supporting alternative authentication methods via OpenVPN’s plugin module interface. This book provides you with many different recipes to help you set up, monitor, and troubleshoot an OpenVPN network. You will learn to configure a scalable, load-balanced VPN server farm that can handle thousands of dynamic connections from incoming VPN clients. You will also get to grips with the encryption, authentication, security, extensibility, and certifications features of OpenSSL. You will also get an understanding of IPv6 support and will get a demonstration of how to establish a connection via IPv64. This book will explore all the advanced features of OpenVPN and even some undocumented options, covering all the common network setups such as point-to-point networks and multi-client TUN-style and TAP-style networks. Finally, you will learn to manage, secure, and troubleshoot your virtual private networks using OpenVPN 2.4.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
OpenVPN Cookbook - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Including configuration files in config files


One of the lesser-known possibilities when using configuration files is the ability to include other configuration files. This can be especially handy when setting up a complex OpenVPN server, where multiple OpenVPN instances are offered simultaneously. The common configuration directives can be stored in a single file, whereas the connection-specific parts can be stored in a file for each instance. In this recipe, we will set up two OpenVPN instances, one using UDP and the other using TCP as the transport protocol.

Note that this option does not allow for the sharing of VPN IP address ranges between instances.

Getting ready

Set up the client and server certificates using the first recipe from Chapter 2Client-server IP-only Networks. For this recipe, the server computer was running CentOS 6 Linux and OpenVPN 2.3.11.

How to do it...

  1. First, create the common configuration file:

            dev tun 
     
            ca       /etc/openvpn/cookbook/ca.crt 
        ...