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Jordan_Waughtal

Member

Registered: 2019-01-08

Posts: 4  

OpenVPN on Devaun

I want to help polish the experience of using a VPN client on Devaun (for traditional desktop users primarily.)  Here are my goals:
  * AFAIK there is no way to manage the OpenVPN service without sudo or root access. There is no way to manage the OpenVPN service from the Desktop. WiCD has this feature planned for the 2.0 release.  I want to create this method.
  * AFAIK the OpenVPN service runs every config file in the /etc/openvpn/ directory. It is only capable of running config files from this directory. So in order to switch between different VPN's it is necessary to switch config files around. This is not the case on Debian.  On Debian OpenVPN can be controlled per config file.

systemctl start openvpn
#starts all config files
systemctl start openvpn@name_of_config_file
#starts name_of_config_file

I would like this functionality in Devaun. I will try to do this myself.

WiCD uses DBus to give access of the networking devices to a normal user. Essentially half of WiCD is a daemon, and runs as root. The other half of the program is what the user intracts with. WiCD uses DBus to communicate between the two processes.

The current version of OpenVPN does not use DBus.  The new OpenVPN3-linux client does, but is not yet stable.

DBus is just one method to control a daemon. WiCD appears to provide a tunnel for a normal user to use commands as root, but in a very limited way.  One method WiCD uses to get information or control the network interfaces, is with commands like ifconfig.  So, it should be possible to control the current version of openvpn.

Last edited by Jordan_Waughtal (2019-01-20 11:36:50)

amesser

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-07-15

Posts: 6  

Website

Re: OpenVPN on Devaun

  * AFAIK the OpenVPN service runs every config file in the /etc/openvpn/ directory. It is only capable of running config files from this directory. So in order to switch between different VPN's it is necessary to switch config files around. This is not the case on Debian.  On Debian OpenVPN can be controlled per config file.

systemctl start openvpn
#starts all config files
systemctl start openvpn@name_of_config_file
#starts name_of_config_file

I dont think this is a good example. I'm pretty sure that name_of_config_file must be also present in /etc/openvpn/. At least I would suggest this from https://salsa.debian.org/debian/openvpn … n@.service.

I consider your Debian example pretty equal to the following Devuan command:

openvpn --daemon --config /etc/openvpn/name_of_config_file.conf

Rootless VPN Management for Desktop users is most likely achieved by network-manager package. But network-manager is also available on Devuan - actually the same package as in Debian.

Nevertheless, please feel excited to extend WiCD. Its an alternative to network-manager and alternatives are always welcome.