Casting Your Net with OpenVPN

A virtual private network (VPN) extends the resources of your local area network to telecommuter’s home, satellite offices, and far-flung sales warriors. OpenVPN is a fast, scalable, secure, and free VPN solution for Linux. And best of all, it’s easy to configure and deploy. Here’s a hands-on primer.

Paul Duncan

Thursday, May 18th, 2006

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OpenVPN (http://openvpn.net/) is a fast, open, free, and scalable SSL/TLS- based virtual private network (VPN) solution. OpenVPN can route, bridge, and scale to hundreds of clients, tunnel over a single port (UDP or TCP, even through HTTP and SOCKS5 proxies), traverse NAT with ease, use static or public key-based encryption, and authenticate via PAM or any other scriptable authentication mechanism. Best of all, OpenVPN is incredibly simple to configure, and it runs in most common operating systems, including *BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD), Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and yes, even Windows.

Let’s set up a PKI-based, routing VPN in Linux for Fancy Sprockets, Incorporated, manufacturers of the world’s finest sprockets, widgets, and doodads (it’s a growth industry). More about Fancy Sprockets later; first, you must install OpenVPN.

OpenVPN requires a kernel with tuntap support, so in practice, that means either a 2.4 or 2.6 kernel with the tuntap module. OpenVPN packages are available for most popular Linux distributions. If you use Debian or one of the many Debian-based distributions, installing OpenVPN couldn’t be easier: Just type apt-get install openvpn as root.

RPM s for Red Hat and Fedora are available from the DAG RPM Repository (http://dag.wieers.com/packages/openvpn/). If you’re using an RPM-based distribution other than Fedora or Red Hat, the OpenVPN source tarball includes a spec file and instructions on building your own RPM. If you’re…

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