You've decided you want to install OpenVPN but don't know how? I'll show you how. Just keep reading.

On CentOS 5 via RPM

You need to install LZO (http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/) compression library on your server before you can install OpenVPN.

Once these are installed, you are ready to install OpenVPN. The following steps will download and install OpenVPN:

Once this command runs, OpenVPN has successfully been installed on your system.

ecrist made a nice howto for setting up openvpn on freebsd...
here is the link
https://www.secure-computing.net/wiki/index.php/OpenVPN_Server

-krzee

There is a Debian installation video as well here.

i tried that centos 5,

but i got this message:

Unable to obtain Session ID from 67.23.249.55:443: XML-RPC: mismatched tag: line 25, column 2

how to correct it?

thx

The CentOS recipe is pretty much outdated.

I suggest first to install the Fedora EPEL repository for RHEL5:

Then it's just a matter of a yum install:

And that's it. Should give you a much newer and more decent version of OpenVPN as well.

For more info about the Fedora EPEL repository for RHEL (and CentOS), go here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ

hi there,
sorry for a noob question,
but i've installed openVPN with yum command on my centos 64 bit (plesk)

i am accessing my server with remote server . so i checked there , but there was not any icon in my server.

can anyone give me link of tutorial of installing it with GUI?

Is your CentOS box going to be a client or server? If a client and if using NetworkManager, there is a NetworkManager OpenVPN plug-in, which gives you a GUI. But this is only if you're setting up your box as an OpenVPN client.

If you want to setup you box as an OpenVPN server (which openvpn clients connects to), there are no GUI for this. On CentOS, you write your config file and places it under /etc/openvpn/ with a *.conf extension. Then you do 'service openvpn start' and then read the log files to debug you config.

There are no shortcuts, and to be frankly, the GUIs is just doing the same which the config file does. And the config files are usually quite easy. If you want a kick-start to something, go buy the OpenVPN 2 Cookbook by Jan Just Keijser https://www.packtpub.com/openvpn-2-cookbook/book ... or read the different how-to's and guides on the net, there are plenty of them - but many of them might not be as good as the book though.

Dazo - not to be picky but this installs openvpn-2.1.4-1.el5.x86_64 and the current release is openvpn-2.2.1. After doing
it installed lzo but when I decompress openvpn-2.2.1 and do a ./configure it errors out complaining about lzo not being found...

So...how would one upgrade to openvpn-2.2.1?

my bad did another ./configure it doesnt complain about lzo not being found. It does complain about this:



Okay...so how do I fix the LZO headers not being found issue?

So I researched this further... I went to LZO's web site downloaded LZO (again) did a ./configure, make, make install and the headers were fixed, but then it complained about openssl headers not being present. So I did a yum search for openssl-devel and installed the latest version, which then fixed that issue. Finally did yet another ./configure in the openvpn directory and low and behold it went to completion. Did a make, make install and didnt see any errors so at this point it looks like the issue is resolved and the latest openvpn version (2.2.1) is installed. This is being installed on a VM instance (virtual box) of CentOS 5.

Then you can try to build openvpn again. That gives you the needed development files (header/include files among others) which is needed when compiling programs which uses these libraries.

Thanks for a great tutorial, but could you please post the server.ovpn file or else the turorial wont work...