just a tip if your DNS fails shortly after connecting

[trainwreck]

i was just gonna say that i had a recent problem accompanying a recent update of the openvpn server on Linux and connecting clients from Windows 7. I have an openvpn server setup that is using the "redirect-gateway" option to funnel all internet traffic through the vpn. After what seemed like a random amount of time, clients would start failing to resolve any DNS name. Oddly enough, nslookup would work, and would use the DNS server provided by their local connecting LAN. But pings would not, neither would any web browser or anything else. Doing a packet trace on all interfaces showed that, after the failure, absolutely NO traffic was being sent during an attempt to resolve a name with ping/other software; it would just immediately give up and complain about not being able to "find the host"

As it turns out, adding a static DNS server IP (presumably anything routable from the client, but i used opendns in this case) to the "Internet Protocol (IPv4)" properties dialog box of the openvpn network interface (in "Network Connections" on Win7) solved this problem. Upon doing this, name resolution begins working again, and packet dumps of the tunneling adapter show port 53 traffic during ping attempts of a name.

Just throwing this out there. If anyone knows whether adding this DNS entry might lead to problems, let me know.