Update exporter package with updated OpenVPN Manager

[mortstar]

None of my users have admin privileges to their Windows laptops, this means they have to use the OpenVPN Manager to connect to our pfSense OpenVPN server. I think it is actually quite a nice way of managing the VPN connection for a non-technical person.

I found that the openvpn-manager that was exported is a couple of versions behind the latest available (0.0.3.6 instead of 0.0.3.8 ). Unfortunately I couldn't just replace the files in the exported exe (through 7zip) as the service has been extracted from the manager GUI interface and the service installation method has changed.

To get the exporter package bundling the latest version of the Manager interface a couple of changes are needed.

• The OpenVPNManager files need updating to 0.0.3.8. Unfortunately the zip file at the downloads page http://openvpn.jowisoftware.de/downloads/ doesn't actually contain the OpenVPNManagerService.exe and OpenVPNManagerService.exe.config files (I think this is a mistake on the developers part). You can extract these files from the setup.exe on that download page (Open the openvpnmanager_0.0.3.8_setup.exe file as an archive within 7zip, go to $COMMONFILES\OpenVPN Manager and find the files here

• Change line 173 of openvpn-postinstall.nsi to

ExecWait '"$BINPATH\OpenVPNManager\OpenVPNManagerService.exe" INSTALL "$BINPATH\bin\openvpn.exe"'

Hope this makes it in to an updated version of the exporter package.

Thanks for all the help on this forum I've got an excellent OpenVPN setup for our road warriors with LDAP authentication against a single Security Group and individual certs for each user.

[jimp]

I've tried updating to the latest version in the package a couple times and hit nothing but dead ends, even with changes such as the ones you mentioned (and many others) it ultimately failed for me.

The developers changed things around a lot between supposedly minor version numbers and the program's behavior doesn't even fit with their own documentation or code comments. If they put out another release that is more consistent and doesn't have missing files, we might look into it, but right now their code is a bit of a mess and I'm hesitant to pull in anything new.

[mortstar]

OK well I've fixed those dead-ends with the two steps outlined above. I've changed the package myself so that it creates this installer for Windows and am using that with my users now.

You're right that the developers have messed things up but there hasn't been any activity for quite some time so I don't expect anything any time soon. Anyway, this was just a post to share my work hopefully it'll be useful at some point.

Thanks

[jochenw]

Hi,

I'm one of the original developers of OpenVPN Manager. One of our major problem is that we don't get much feedback. You're right, splitting out the service as a separate component in a minor release was a rather stupid idea. I hope, this never happens again :-)

Also, non of us was aware of the fact that the zip file is incomplete. This can be fixed in a few seconds (in fact, I repaired the donwload this morning), just open a short ticket!

Long story short: if something does not work very well, please drop a line here: https://github.com/jochenwierum/openvpn-manager/issues. We can help :-)

Cheers
Jochen

[divsys]

Speaking for a very small segment of the pfsense community (ie. Myself), thank you very much for taking the time to drop in and give us an update.

I've used the OpenVPN Manager and OpenVPN for many projects and it's one of the nicest combinations of work I've used.

Thanks again!