Assertion failed at crypto.c:162

fracas

I recently had an issue with connecting my openvpn clients to the server. I was using Webmin, on Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring Edition, and the client would hook up to the server, and then disconnect. Searching both the client, and server logs I saw this error generated on the client logs. "Assertion failed at crypto.c:162".
After searching this error on google, and finding, at least, one other person who had encountered this error, I looked to the issues that could crop up with the crypto. This turned out to be a very simple fix. Webmin creates files with octal permissions, of 700. The running deamon can't enter the directories where the information of the client is. Running "chmod -R 755 /etc/openvpn" corrected the situation. I haven't refined the permissions at this point to reduce access, but I suspect, I can reduce the octal numbers some before the daemon can't read the data anymore.

janjust

this is the first time I hear that the permissions on the /etc/openvpn directory trigger that assertion ....
the minimim permissions needed depend a bit on the server configuration; most likely openvpn is configured to run using

user openvpn
group openvpn

or something similar - it is this user that must have access to the /etc/openvpn directory. You can achieve that by either chown'ing or chgrp'ing the directory. After that you can remove at least the 'other' permissions (i.e. 750)