Ok thanks for clearing that up. Yes, for connection authentication I meant user authentication, the same as what you described. As for gmail, I guess they don't care who you are, so as long as you sign your own certificate they'll accept the connection. Thanks.

This sounds as a good idea for a bounty.

How are you testing this? With iperf? I had similar experiences that sometimes i got 2Mbit upstream on a 512kbit line…. Though i havent had the time to investigate further. But 500 Kbyte/s on windows is pretty much 4Mbit which seems strange on a 3Mbit line. So yeah there is probably some compressing going on. If you hit the CPU-max while doing the transfers you could try to use a different encryption for the tunnel. Maybe something less CPU intensive.

OK re-enabled slbd today and it works, even after slbds ICMP poll states DOWN and filters are reloaded, daemons stay alive. I think the problem is related to two things: one interface changing (dhcp, dis-/enabling) reloading openvpn daemons via the stated command (sh killall -HUP openvpn) The SIGHUP seems to kill a random number of daemons while restarting them (whysoever). ATM I'm ordering new CF-cards to try a clean new installation on one of these and do some modifications. If anyone knows more about that "restart phenomenom" or has problems alike I would be glad to hear some comments.

If you do that you could as well do what albertmm did and have a separate openVPN server ;)

This is exactly what's happening to me as of now: i needed to reboot the adsl router at the office, then trying to connect to the vpn simply doesn't work and "inactivity timeout" pops up. In my case i'm trying to connect to the vpn manually via the windows openvpn gui, it always worked great and this is the first time i've got to reboot the adsl router so i never experienced this problem before.. Any clue on what it could be?

Just for your information. I found a much easier fix for this problem with Tunnelblick. Apply the small patch from http://code.google.com/p/tunnelblick/issues/detail?id=8#c10 and everything works fine.

I'm running Vista and since i didn't want to install the RC i got it running adding these lines to the openvpn client configuration: route-method exe route-delay 2 That did it for me.

Yep…sorry  :( I like your "backup" definition  :)

Thank you for all your answers ! I finally opted for manually setting up OpenVPN in a fresh Debian install  ;D ! It works like a charm  :) !

Could you explain how to do that? This is my first experience with setting up any kind of VPN.

Details of the error message (logs etc) and your configuration would be useful.  There are also forums for people who's primary language isn't English if you would find it easier working in your native language.

Ok this was a tricky one: I was doing a migration from ipsec to openvpn (bc/ ipsec does not support site-to-site where B as has a dynamic IP) and i still had my ipsec config activated - so this somewhat confused pfsense. I disabled the tunnels in question on the ipsec page and my openvpn started working!

Thanks got it working now.