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

Connecting Windows and Linux


Connections between these two operating systems are almost as simple as those described in the previous section. The steps that need to be taken are exactly the same. However, there are two pitfalls that you must avoid, and both of the pitfalls are connected to transferring files from Windows to Linux (or back).

File Exchange between Windows and Linux

On Linux, remote command execution and data exchange through the SSH is the standard. SSH also uses OpenSSL for encryption, like OpenVPN. Windows, however, has no built-in support for encrypted data exchange.

Windows systems use the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol to communicate and exchange data. Linux has no native support for this, but there is a powerful server suite called Samba, which can be used to make Linux machines appear like Windows PCs (and even integrate them into Active Directory domains).

So how do we copy the key file from a Windows machine to a Linux server? There are two possibilities. Either...