OpenVPN Configuration

If you are using Windows then you probably would want to download the precompiled OpenVPN package available here. If not, then you first need to install OpenVPN on your machine. Most Linux distributions include that package already. On Ubuntu/Debian e.g. you would need to run

 aptitude install openvpn

For other Unix/Linux destributions there are similar package managers. If you can't find a package for your OS you can find the source code and compilation documentation on the official OpenVPN website. That website also provides a lot of other useful documentation.

For MacOS you will find some documenation here until we roll out a package for OSX.

Once you have OpenVPN installed please run:

openvpn --mktun --dev tap0 

After that download the two configuration files attached below and put them in a directory (for example ~/openvpn). After that you will be able to run

openvpn ~/openvpn/oxmaths.conf 

to initiate the connection.

Configuring Linux clients to use DNS informations provided by VPN server

Older Linux versions don't automatically accept the DNS servers provided by OpenVPN. To work around this please follow this procedure.

Note that this information was taken from http://howto.landure.fr/gnu-linux/debian-4-0-etch-en/install-and-setup-o... .

First download the script client.up that fetches DNS information from the VPN server, and inserts it in the resolv.conf file. Put the script into some directory, for example /etc/openvpn. Then make it executable:

chmod +x /etc/openvpn/client.up

Then add the following lines to oxmaths.conf

# VPN provided DNS configuration.
up /etc/openvpn/client.up
route-up /etc/openvpn/client.up
plugin /usr/lib/openvpn/openvpn-down-root.so "script_type=down /etc/openvpn/client.up"

You just need to restart your VPN client to activate this configuration :

/etc/init.d/openvpn restart