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

Installing OpenVPN on FreeBSD


FreeBSD and BSD in general are UNIX systems of outstanding stability and security and are therefore very popular among network administrators. In practice, with FreeBSD you do not have to worry much about security issues of the software you install, but you may not always get up-to-date versions.

FreeBSD also has a modern software management system. Simply type pkg_add -vr openvpn, and OpenVPN Software is installed on your system. Calling pkg_add with the parameter -r installs software from remote servers, similar to apt-get or rpm. If you run into problems, increasing verbosity with the parameter -v can be helpful.

The following excerpt shows the output of pkg_add:

freebsd# pkg_add -vr openvpn
looking up ftp.freebsd.org
connecting to ftp.freebsd.org:21
setting passive mode
opening data connection
initiating transfer
Fetching ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5.4-release/Latest/openvpn
.tbz...x +CONTENTS
x +COMMENT
(...)
x share/doc/openvpn...