OpenVPN Connect User Guide (2024)

FAQs

How do I use OpenVPN Connect? ›

OpenVPN offers better encryption than Open Connect, but this comes at the cost of being slower in comparison. The decision between which one to use depends on your needs as an individual or company's needs depending on how much you want to spend for faster speeds or better security.

The OpenVPN Community Edition (CE) is an open source Virtual Private Network (VPN) project. It creates secure connections over the Internet using a custom security protocol that utilizes SSL/TLS. This community-supported OSS (Open Source Software) project, using a GPL license, is supported by many OpenVPN Inc.

No matter what solution you choose, you can use our free connections until you're ready to scale. Those VPN connections are free for life. We're that confident you'll trust OpenVPN to manage your network security.

What distinguishes OpenVPN from other VPN packages? OpenVPN's principal strengths include cross-platform portability across most of the known computing universe, excellent stability, scalability to hundreds or thousands of clients, relatively easy installation, and support for dynamic IP addresses and NAT.

Anyone can use the OpenVPN open-source code client to set up their VPN connection. Most VPN providers include the OpenVPN protocol in their software. However, while OpenVPN refers to one tunneling protocol, a VPN provider can offer multiple VPN protocols, such as WireGuard® and IKEv2/IPsec.

Check OpenVPN Status

The first place to check is Status > OpenVPN, which displays the connection status for each OpenVPN instance. If a VPN is connected, waiting, reconnecting, etc, it is indicated on that screen. For more information, see OpenVPN Server and Client Status.

How do I use OpenVPN at home? ›

In the OpenVPN connection, the home network can act as a server, and the remote device can access the server through the router which acts as an OpenVPN Server gateway. To use the VPN feature, you should enable OpenVPN Server on your router, and install and run VPN client software on the remote device.

To run OpenVPN, you can: Right click on an OpenVPN configuration file (.ovpn) and select Start OpenVPN on this configuration file. Once running, you can use the F4key to exit. Once running in a command prompt window, OpenVPN can be stopped by the F4 key.

Before you begin

To follow this tutorial, you need Access Server set up and a user account for yourself. If you don't have these things, contact your administrator. You'll also need to know the domain or IP address for the Client Web UI and your credentials for signing in.

Alternatively, you can find the password and URL information in the file /usr/local/openvpn_as/init. log. Note: Access Server versions older than 2.10 do not automatically generate a password. On older versions you set the password manually by typing passwd openvpn on the command line.

Description. The account 'root' on the remote host has the password 'openvpnas'. An attacker may leverage this issue to gain administrative access to the affected system. Note that OpenVPN Access Server virtual appliances are known to use these credentials to provide complete, administrative access to the appliance.

Once you have installed OpenConnect and checked that you have a vpnc-script which will set up the routing and DNS for it, using OpenConnect is very simple. As root, run the following command for an AnyConnect/ocserv VPN: openconnect https://vpn.mycompany.com/

The OpenVPN protocol isn't built into Windows. Therefore, you must install a client app to communicate with Access Server. A client app captures the traffic you want to send through the OpenVPN tunnel, encrypts it, passes it to the server, and decrypts the return traffic.