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

Windows 8+ - ensuring DNS lookups are secure


Starting with Windows 8.1, Microsoft introduced a new feature for resolving hostnames to IP addresses. Whenever an application wants to resolve a hostname, a DNS query is sent out over all network adapters found in the system. The answer from the first adapter that responds to the query is used.

If a user wants to tunnel all traffic over a VPN in a secure manner, then this feature is not desirable. In a hostile network environment, a bogus IP address could be returned or even the fact that a DNS lookup for a particular host is made could be considered dangerous.

Starting with OpenVPN 2.3.10, a new option, block-outside-dns, was added to suppress this feature. In this recipe, we will show how to use this option.

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. The client computer was running...