Installing OpenVPN on FreeBSD

FreeBSD and BSD in general are UNIX systems of outstanding stability and security and are therefore very popular among network administrators. In practice, with FreeBSD you do not have to worry much about security issues of the software you install, but you may not always get up-to-date versions.

FreeBSD also has a modern software management system. Simply type pkg_add -vr openvpn, and OpenVPN Software is installed on your system. Calling pkg_add with the parameter -r installs software from remote servers, similar to apt-get or rpm. If you run into problems, increasing verbosity with the parameter -v can be helpful.

The following excerpt shows the output of pkg_add:

freebsd# pkg_add -vr openvpn
looking up ftp.freebsd.org
connecting to ftp.freebsd.org:21
setting passive mode
opening data connection
initiating transfer
Fetching ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5.4-release/Latest/openvpn
.tbz...x +CONTENTS
x +COMMENT
(...)
x share/doc/openvpn...