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 - elevated privileges


With the introduction of Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced User Access Control (UAC). UAC is meant to safeguard users from running programs that can modify the operating system itself. Before such a program is run, a privilege elevation is required even if the user has full administrator rights. A dialog box appears that the user must click on before the execution begins. In order to run OpenVPN, elevated privileges are needed, as OpenVPN wants to open a system device and start a VPN connection. Especially if routes need to be added to the system, elevated privileges are essential.

With OpenVPN 2.3+, privilege elevation is built into the OpenVPN GUI application. That is, even if the Run as Administrator flag is turned off, the OpenVPN GUI application will still request elevated privileges when it is launched. This recipe will demonstrate this behavior, which was not present in older versions of OpenVPN.

Getting ready

Set up the client and server certificates...