So I followed the Static Key Mini HOWTO at
https://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/miscellaneous/78-static-key-mini-howto.html and it worked just fine; I was able to connect successfully and route all client traffic through the VPN. Using a network analyzer on the client side I was able to confirm that indeed all packets were being routed to the VPN server.
Then I changed the last character of the static key on the client side and tried to reconnect to see what would happen. Surprisingly, I got the "Initialization Sequence Completed" message, but tihs time the client traffic no longer appeared to be successfully routed through the VPN, i.e. it was as if the client no longer had an active internet connection. On the client side, when I opened a network analyzer I could see that packets were still being sent to the server IP, so there must have been some 'refusal' happening on the server side which the client couldn't see that caused requests to be ignored.
It seems strange to me that the client never received a connection refusal message in this case and that packets continued to be sent to the server even though the server presumably recognized the key as inauthentic.
Can anyone explain what is happening here?
Also, is there a way to have the server make it clear to the client that the key was rejected and to refuse all future connection attempts?
Thanks for your time
