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

Bridging - Linux


This recipe will demonstrate how to set up a bridged OpenVPN server. In this mode, the local network and the VPN network are bridged, which means that all of the traffic from one network is forwarded to the other and vice versa.

This setup is often used to securely connect remote clients to a Windows-based LAN, but it is quite hard to get it right. In almost all cases, it suffices to use a TUN-style network with a local WINS server on the OpenVPN server itself. A bridged VPN does have its advantages, as will become apparent in the next few recipes.

However, there are also disadvantages to using bridging, especially in terms of performance: the performance of a bridged 100 Mbps Ethernet adapter is about half the performance of a non-bridged adapter.

Getting ready

We use the following network layout:

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