OpenVPN 1.5-beta4 - now ported to W2K/XP

  • Thread starter Thread starter Gordon Darling
  • Start date Start date
G

Gordon Darling

Subject: OpenVPN 1.5-beta4 Development
- OpenVPN is a robust and highly configurable VPN daemon.

OpenVPN 1.5-beta4 Development
by James Yonan (http://freshmeat.net/~jyonan/) Wednesday, August 6th
2003 07:38

About:
OpenVPN is a robust and highly configurable VPN (Virtual Private Network)
daemon which can be used to securely link two or more private networks
using an encrypted tunnel over the Internet. OpenVPN's principal strengths
include wide cross-platform portability, excellent stability, support for
dynamic IP addresses and NAT, adaptive link compression, single TCP/UDP
port usage, a modular design that offloads most crypto tasks to the
OpenSSL library, and relatively easy installation that in most cases
doesn't require a special kernel module.

Changes:
This release includes the long-awaited port of OpenVPN to Windows 2000/XP,
adding to OpenVPN's already wide cross-platform span, which includes
Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris. In this beta, Win32 installation has
been greatly streamlined with the completion of a self-installing exe,
based on the Nullsoft install system. In addition, TCP support has been
added as a tunnel transport option.

Release focus: Major feature enhancements
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Project URL: http://freshmeat.net/projects/openvpn/

Regards
Gordon
 
Changes:
This release includes the long-awaited port of OpenVPN to Windows
2000/XP, adding to OpenVPN's already wide cross-platform span, which
includes Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris. In this beta, Win32
installation has been greatly streamlined...
Click to expand...

Does it work with Windows NT?

The "Win32" implies that it does. However, I don't see anything explicitly
saying that it will work one way or the other.
 
Afraid I can't help as I don't have a NT box here. I'd guess that if it
runs on W2K then it should run on WinNT.
Click to expand...

That is false more often than it is true. Anything with DirectX, USB, or
Firewire, will not work on NT. Networking is more compatible than other
parts of the OS, but it is still, AFAIK, possible to have a networking app
work on 2000 and fail on NT.

If you are unsure as to whether your programs will run on NT, then you
should not label them as being compatible with Win32. At least state that
it is untested, but should/shouldn't work on NT.

There are countless apps that claim Win32 compatibility, yet don't work on
NT. If I don't have explicit confirmation one way or another, I won't even
bother trying a new program.
 
Darrien said:
That is false more often than it is true. Anything with DirectX, USB, or
Firewire, will not work on NT. Networking is more compatible than other
parts of the OS, but it is still, AFAIK, possible to have a networking app
work on 2000 and fail on NT.

If you are unsure as to whether your programs will run on NT, then you
should not label them as being compatible with Win32. At least state that
it is untested, but should/shouldn't work on NT.

There are countless apps that claim Win32 compatibility, yet don't work on
NT. If I don't have explicit confirmation one way or another, I won't even
bother trying a new program.
Click to expand...

Sorry, OpenVPN only runs on 2000/XP right now (not NT or the 9x/me
series). I've tried to emphasize 2000/XP-only compatibility but some
websites like freshmeat and sourceforge don't even have a category for
2000/XP-only compatibility.

While I would like for OpenVPN to run on NT or 9x/Me, there are
sufficient development hurdles presented by incompatibilities between
the platforms that make this difficult for an open source project with
limited resources. Having said that, if someone out there wants to
port OpenVPN to NT (shouldn't be too difficult) or 9x/Me (more
difficult) I will certainly support you as much as I can.

The major reason why NT isn't supported now is that OpenVPN requires
the TAP-Win32 virtual ethernet driver (bundled in the OpenVPN
install), and the NT driver model is somewhat incompatible with the
2000/XP driver model which is even more incompatible with the 9x/me
driver model. As a developer, if you aren't very careful with your
understanding of the subtle differences between the driver models, you
may end up with a driver that has the worst kind of bug --
intermittent BSOD crashes. Try running an NT driver without power
management smarts on an XP system.

Another reason is that the OpenVPN installer depends on devcon.exe to
install and configure the virtual TAP-Win32 adapter. Microsoft has
not (to my knowledge) backported this utility to NT or 9x. The other
important tool which has been indispensable to me in making the
TAP-Win32 driver as stable as it is, is the windows driver verifier,
also not available for NT or 9x.

Interestingly enough OpenVPN itself (i.e. openvpn.exe) actually runs
fine on Win32 (including NT) -- but it is the TAP-Win32 driver
dependency that throws a wrench into NT and 9x/me compatibility (BTW,
I do put up a warning dialog box on install if you try to install on
an unsupported platform). While it's somewhat an issue of semantics,
"Win32" really refers to the windows user-mode API which is stable
enough that it would be difficult to write a userspace program that
was even capable of acting differently on NT vs. 2000/XP. It's the
kernel-mode API that is much more unstable between different windows
versions, and since device drivers must interact with the kernel mode
API, it makes driver compatibility more of a problem across the
windows universe.

James Yonan
OpenVPN developer
jim AT yonan.net
 
Sorry, OpenVPN only runs on 2000/XP right now (not NT or the 9x/me
series). I've tried to emphasize 2000/XP-only compatibility but some
websites like freshmeat and sourceforge don't even have a category for
2000/XP-only compatibility.
Click to expand...

snip

Thanks for the feedback and info James. And congratulations on an
excellent piece of software.

Regards
Gordon
 
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