Windows: public versus private network adapters

With Windows Vista and 7, Microsoft introduced the concept of network classes. Network interfaces can be part of a Private or Public network. When using OpenVPN, one must be careful in which type of network the adapter is placed. By default, OpenVPN's TAP-Win32 adapter is placed in a Public network, which has a side-effect that it is not possible to mount file shares. In this recipe, we will show how to change the network type so that the trusted services such as file sharing are possible over a VPN connection. While this has a little to do with configuring the OpenVPN per se, this issue comes up often enough to warrant a recipe.

Getting ready

For this recipe, the server computer was running CentOS 5 Linux and OpenVPN 2.1.1. The client computer was running Windows Vista SP1 and OpenVPN 2.1.3. Keep the configuration file, basic-udp-server.conf, from the Chapter 2 recipe Server-side routing at hand, as well as the client configuration file, basic...