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Using OpenVPN-Gui to start service

Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2020 5:56 pm
by FireLlama
Hi,
I'm not sure if this belongs here, but the other subforums also didn't look like the right place for it.

Basically what I want to achieve is to start my openvpn-service with the newest gui. Instead it seems to start its own connection with the credentials of the loggedin user.

My workaround right now is to install the latest openvpn setup, afterwards copying openvpn-gui 10 (from the openvpn setup 2.3.18) into the program directory. This old gui does exactly what I want. It starts and stops the openvpn service and if the tray symbol is filled with green colour I can see with one glance to the system tray if the service is running or not.

Is there a way to get the latest gui to do just that?

Re: Using OpenVPN-Gui to start service

Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2020 8:10 pm
by TinCanTech
The GUI from OpenVPN 2.3 allows only an administrator user to run openvpn.

This is a security flaw in OpenVPN 2.3

The GUI from OpenVPN 2.4 allows a non-administrator user to run openvpn.

This is achieved via the Openvpn-Interactive-Service.

OpenVPN and the GUI included with 2.4 will do exactly what you want,
you just need to configure it correctly.

Re: Using OpenVPN-Gui to start service

Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2020 8:53 pm
by FireLlama
Firstly: Thank you for your reply.

The openvpn-service itself runs under the system user, yes. But according to this article, the interactive service does, too.

And you don't need an administrator account for the 2.3 gui. You just need to give your users privileges to start and stop the openvpn-service. Subinacl is all you need for that.

In that case I (sincerely) don't understand the difference.

I'll look into integrating the interactive service, maybe I missed something there.

Re: Using OpenVPN-Gui to start service

Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2020 11:21 am
by TinCanTech