Mike's Tech Blog

The first thing you need to do is to log in via your browser into the IPcop firewall from the computer you want to use the VPN on. Go to the OpenVPN page. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for the Host Certificate for the computer you are on. Over on the right side associated with the computer, you will see the following icons:

 Notice the icon I have circled in orange. You need to click these to download the client info for the client computer. (not necessairly the first one, but the one for your client computer) This will be a zip file. Unzip the contents. There will be two files. Remember where they are, as they will be copied into the proper folder later.



Next we need to download and install the OpenVPN GUI Client. This is located at: www.openvpn.se On the left side you will see the Download area. Click the Stable link. Click the link under Installation Package (Both 32-bit and 64-bit TAP driver. As of this writing, the filename is: openvpn-2.0.9-gui-1.0.3-install.exe.After it is downloaded, install it, and just use the default settings. when it is finished, you need to copy the two unzipped host certificate files files you downloaded from the IPcop firewall into the C:\Program files\OpenVPN\config folder.

After you have installed the OpenVPN client package, you will have
the following icon at the bottom left hand corner of your screen.

 

 

 

 

The next thing to do is to try to connect to the VPN from your Windows computer. To do this, just right click on the

A window will open up, and in a few seconds you will be asked for your password.This is your PKCS12 password that you were suppoesd to remember.

Once you are connected, you will see the following in the lower right corner of your screen:

 

Now you should be able to ping your server on your VPN. If so, its now time to connect to your server through your VPN. If you can, then you have successfully set up your VPN.

The next step is to connect to the server that is behind the VPN. Unfortunately you can't use Neetwork Neighborhood, and browse to the servers behind the VPN. This is because windows networking is not routable. So here is how you connect to the server. Click on the Start button, then Run in the box type in cmd and click OK. This will open up a DOS window. Type in the following:

Net use Z: \\server_IP\share /user:domain\username

Where Server_IP is the IP address of the server you want to connect, and domain is the domain that the server is in. I also used the Z: drive in this example. You need to select a drive letter that doesn't already have a drive assigned to it.

For example, if my server has an IP address of 10.26.0.11, it is in the domain of MANAGEMENT, my username is: mthompson, and the sharename is data, the above command will look like this:

 net use Z: \\10.26.0.11\data /user:MANAGEMENT\mthompson

It will then ask you for a password. To access your new Z: drive, just open up My Computer and you will see you new Z: drive share.

You are now ready to use your VPN. So now when you are at home on the weekend, you can finish that report the boss wants!

Update: Recently I added VPN to one of our internal IpCop Firewalls. We were experiencing dropped connections. It seems that if a windows PC is running QOS (they usually are..) this is the issue. Most of the time you don't need QOS, so I recommend just uninstalling it. Apparently just disabling it won't do the trick, but uninstalling QOS does. To do so, just RIGHT click on My Network Places then click on Properties then RIGHT click on the appropriate Local Area Connection then click on Properties. LEFT click ONCE on QOS Packet Scheduler then click on the Uninstall button. That should do the trick.

  -- Mike

 

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