OpenVPN client on Windows 8 - connects but nothing works [includes solution]
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Hi, folks. I've had a bit of an adventure getting a simple Road-Warrior setup working on a brand-new pfSense installation, and it seems this might be worthy of it's own post for helping others out.
The issue I was experiencing was that the OpenVPN client (2.3.2 i686-w64-mingw32) that I generated from the Client Install plugin installed fine, and everything seemed to connect successfully.
The problem was that despite routes existing, no data would actually pass through the tunnel.
This is resolved by simply starting the Windows service "Network Connections", which is by default set to Manual, and only starts when you are viewing the "Network Connections" control panel applet. Setting this to "Automatic" means that the VPN connections work perfectly.
So, in summary:
If you're on Windows 8, and need to use OpenVPN, you need to either start the Network Connections service each time, or set it to start automatically.