Summary

OpenVPN offers great possibilities; especially the networking concept allows very transparent setups with firewalls or in road warrior configurations. James Yonan, the founder has made very good decisions when trusting the TUN/TAP network drivers and the SSL/TLS libraries. OpenVPN was first published in 2001; version 2 came out in 2005 and offers much more advanced features than the versions before. Multi-client support, the Windows version, and the push/pull options are only some of its features. OpenVPN is easy to configure and has only a few weaknesses, the most serious of which is its incompatibility to IPsec by design. But to name this a weakness is a tough verdict, if it is compared to IPsec as done in this chapter. IPsec still is the standard, but OpenVPN has much more features at a much better security level.