Installing OpenVPN is easy and platform independent. Modern Linux systems, such as SuSE, Red Hat, Debian, or Ubuntu, provide sophisticated installation and package management systems, and still offer other ways to install the software. In this two-part article by Markus Feilner, we will install it on different Linux versions and FreeBSD.
All Linux/Unix systems must meet the following requirements to install OpenVPN successfully:

  • Your system must provide support for the Universal TUN/TAP driver. The kernels newer than version 2.4 of almost all modern Linux distributions provide support for TUN/TAP devices. Only if you are using an old distribution or if you have built your own kernel, will you have to add this support to your configuration. This project's web site can be found at https://vtun.sourceforge.net/tun/.
  • OpenSSL libraries have to be installed on your system. I have never encountered any modern Linux/Unix system that does not meet this requirement. However, if you want to compile OpenVPN from source code, the SSL development package may be necessary. The web site is https://www.openssl.org:443/.
  • The Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO) Compression library has to be installed. Again, most modern Linux/Unix systems provide these packages, so there shouldn't be any problem. LZO is a real-time compression library that is used by OpenVPN to compress data before sending. Packages can be found on https://openvpn.net/community-downloads/, and the web site of this project is http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/.

The link for this article located at PactPub is no longer available.