Win8 - Why so many processes of OpenVPN.exe?

[starshine]

I am connecting to my VPN provider's servers at startup, to route all my traffic through them.

I have noticed that I have 20-30 instances of OpenVPN showing up as running in the Task Manager. Why so many?

Is it one per connection, or have I done something wrong with my configuration?

[starshine]

I am connecting to my VPN provider's servers at startup

This forum does not provide support for VPN provider Companies.

have I done something wrong

Most likely .. check you log files.

The question has NOTHING to do with the VPN provider.
To rephrase:

Is it normal behaviour for OpenVPN to open up numerous instances of the .exe process when routing all outgoing connections through OpenVPN?

I would have expected that one process was sufficient, and neither, me, nor my script is asking for openvpn.exe to be opened more than once.

[starshine]

Thanks for the clarification Debbie -
Ok, I actually have 48 .ovpn files in that directory.
The number of open openvpn.exe processes is around 40.OpenVPNGUI.exe wasn't even open.

The .ovpn files in Config contains connectivity details for different servers.
I only use one of them though, in my connection, called "default.ovpn". The others are good to have, but I don't use them on a daily basis.
I'm not aware that anything would be trying to access those files.

The connection at bootup is done with the OpenVPN Windows service, and it's just connecting to the VPN and telling it to route all traffic through it, nothing else. This is working fine. It starts fine and all the traffic is using it.

But the multiple instances of openvpn.exe seem to be there almost from the start. They aren't using any resources at all, hardly, so it's not a problem per se. I'm just wondering why it's happening and it seems a a bit messy having all these processes running if they are not needed.

There is the script in my Startup folder:

"C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\bin\openvpn-gui.exe" --connect DefaultVPN.ovpn

The Code there is:

Code: Select all

client
dev tun
proto udp
remote-random
remote xxx.248.174.41 xxx
resolv-retry 5
nobind
fast-io
push "redirect-gateway def1"
auth-user-pass auth.txt
tun-mtu 1500
tun-mtu-extra 32
mssfix 1450
persist-key
persist-tun
ca globalca.crt
comp-lzo
route-delay 5 30
script-security 3 system
mute-replay-warnings
verb 3
push "redirect-gateway def1"
push "dhcp-option DNS 62.204.xxx.xxx"

I'm a bit confused as to why it is that I am trying to run OpenVPNGUI, but what actually runs, and connects with the info I am sending to OpenVPNGUI, is the Service.

While trying to figure out what's going on here, I will manuall disable the Service and move those ovpn files out of the config directories, apart from the Default one.