Today it was the second time i was asked by a friend to help him in fixing his openvpn on windows 7 and to tell you the truth it was exactly same problem that i had fixed before, before he had to reinstall windows that is. Being clumsy i didn’t make notes in the past on how i fixed it and wasted a lot of time after which i came to a solution. So here are some tips for people who are using OpenVPN on windows to avoid issues that i come across frequency:

  • Create a shortcut icon of Open VPN GUI on desktop.
  • Right click on it and set it to:
    • Run with administrator privileges
    • Run in Windows 2000 Environment.
  • Its better if you set these permissions for all users.

Next if you see something like:
Successful ARP Flush on interface [13] {0C82CA25-8FF3-4B92-A0C1-21CDE5F96BBB}
TEST ROUTES: 1/1 succeeded len=1 ret=1 a=0 u/d=up
route ADD 192.168.50.0 MASK 255.255.255.0 192.168.50.17
ROUTE: route addition failed using CreateIpForwardEntry: One or more arguments are not correct.   [if_index=13]
Route addition via IPAPI failed

Then make sure you have the following in your client’s configuration file:

route-method exe
route-delay 2

You can tweak route-delay depending on your deployment and network if needed. If there is something else no behaving, be sure to check log first and ask in #openvpn on irc.freenode.net, there are some very nice fellows out there.

… And this was my 100th Post and with it i am back to blogging, hopefully i will stick a bit longer than before.

PS:

This post did contain a lot of mistake before as i typed it in hurry, my connection was gonna run out and it actually did while i was making modifications to correct it.


Aug 22 20:20:16 blade pppd[6745]: CHAP authentication failed: Illegal user or password.
Aug 22 20:20:16 blade pppd[6745]: CHAP authentication failed.
Aug 22 20:20:16 blade pppd[6745]: Connection terminated.