Windows Vista/7: elevated privileges

With the introduction of Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced User Access Control (UAC). UAC is meant to safeguard users from running programs that can modify the operating system itself. Before such a program is run, privilege elevation is required, even if the user has full Administrator rights. A dialog box appears that the user must click on before the execution begins. In order to run OpenVPN, elevated privileges are needed, as OpenVPN wants to open a system device and start a VPN connection. Especially, if the routes need to be added to the system, elevated privileges are essential.

This recipe shows how OpenVPN can be set up on Windows Vista/7 with elevated privileges, including how to run up and down scripts.

Getting ready

Set up the client and server certificates using the first recipe from Chapter 2, Client-server IP-only Networks. For this recipe, the server computer was running CentOS 5 Linux and OpenVPN 2.1.1. The client computer was running...