Difference between revisions of "OpenVPN notes"

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up "~/.openvpn/openvpn-dns-config.sh up"
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up "/home/USERNAME/.openvpn/openvpn-dns-config.sh up"
down "~/.openvpn/openvpn-dns-config.sh down"
+
down "/home/USERNAME/.openvpn/openvpn-dns-config.sh down"
 
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Revision as of 12:33, 29 October 2008


general client setup

Put all of the user's config files in ~/.openvpn. Note that each user will have their own client.key and client.crt files. The client.conf file will need to be slightly updated for each user.

  • client.conf
  • ca.crt
  • client.crt
  • client.key
  • openvpn-dns-config.sh

client.conf

Note that you will have to edit ~/.openvpn/client.conf to set the full path your the ca.crt, client.crt, and client.key files. Unfortunately OpenVPN does not expand ~ notation for the user home directory. Otherwise all users could have the exact same client.conf file. The only difference would be the client.key and client.crt. This seems like a stupid oversight to me that complicates the config process. Perhaps there is some other idiom to handle this problem. Find the following lines in client.conf and replace USERNAME with the username in question:

ca /home/USERNAME/.openvpn/ca.crt
cert /home/USERNAME/.openvpn/client.crt
key /home/USERNAME/.openvpn/client.key

You will also want to add up and down hooks in your ~/.openvpn/client.conf for this script, openvpn-dns-config.sh. You can drop this script in ~/.openvpn. This will allow OpenVPN to automatically update your /etc/resolv.conf with the DNS server on the remote side of the VPN. Note that this script was originally written for OSX, but it works fine without changes on Ubuntu Linux. These are the lines you will want to add to ~/.openvpn/client.conf to support automatic DNS config:

up "/home/USERNAME/.openvpn/openvpn-dns-config.sh up"
down "/home/USERNAME/.openvpn/openvpn-dns-config.sh down"

VPN startup and shutdown

Add these alias to your .bash_aliases file or wherever you keep them:

alias vpnup='sudo /usr/sbin/openvpn --config ~/.openvpn/client.conf --writepid ~/.openvpn/openvpn.pid --daemon'
alias vpndown='sudo kill -INT `cat ~/.openvpn/openvpn.pid`'

Remove the password from an OpenVPN key

The user's client.key generated by `openvpn --genkey` is an OpenSSL RSA key. You can use `openssl` commands on the key. This will overwrite the existing user.key file:

openssl rsa -in client.key -out client.key