The company I have been working for for a couple of months has an OpenVPN server running. Recently I wanted to install the client software on my Windows 7 desktop and my Linux laptop.
Our IT guy kindly supplied me with a executable to install and configure the client under Windows and a config file and certificates for Linux.
Windows 7 worked immediately but under Linux I had to do some extra steps to get it working properly. I’ll document them here for future reference and maybe other people running in to the same issues.
I had previously installed OpenVPN under linux and hoped the config file would be all I needed. When running
openvpn –config configfile.ovpn
I got the error message:
Options error: Unrecognized option or missing parameter(s) in configfile.ovpn:11: verify-x509-name (2.2.1)
Use –help for more information.
Some digging around showed the “verify-x509-name” command was implemented starting at OpenVPN version 2.3. Using
apt-get install openvpn
and the default repositories in Ubuntu the installed version was 2.2.1
To get the latest version, I uninstalled the current installed version using
apt-get purge openvpn
then downloaded and untarred the latest version from the community downloads (at this time 2.3.6)
wget http://swupdate.openvpn.org/community/releases/openvpn-2.3.6.tar.gz
tar -zxvf ./openvpn-2.3.6.tar.gz
Installing should work this way:
cd ./openvpn-2.3.6
./config && sudo make && sudo make install
but I ran into dependency problems. Some error messages came up regarding the LZO package.
configure: error: lzo enabled but missing
I found this page by Droidzone describing the dependencies and some useful information on how to find missing dependencies during future installs. Worth a read.
In short:
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev liblzo2-dev libpam0g-dev
will install the necessary dependencies. After this the installation went fine:
openvpn –version
OpenVPN 2.3.2 x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu [SSL (OpenSSL)] [LZO] [EPOLL] [eurephia] [MH] [IPv6] built on Dec 24 2014
Dieter Vansteenwegen (ON4DD) 
It works! Thanks
Hi Eduardo,
Glad this could be of help to someone.
Dieter
Hi, I managed to get to “./config && sudo make && sudo make install” then I get
./config No such file or directory.
Any chance you can point me in the right direction please?
I also installed the dependencies and tried again
Lee
It’s OK I managed to figure it out I was in wrong directory.
Hi Lee,
Glad you could sort it out. “pwd” does work magic sometimes :)
Dieter
thanks a lot your solution is still valid on ubuntu 14.04 today!
Ah, that’s good to know!
Reinstalled my system from scratch a while ago (running 15.10 64-bit on my main system right now), but haven’t gotten around installing OpenVPN yet…
After I try it out on 15.10, I’ll update the info.
Regards,
Dieter
Thank you for posting this awesome article. I’m a long time reader but I’ve
never been compelled to leave a comment. I subscribed to your blog and shared it on my Twitter.
I will come back for sure to check your future articles!
wow exactly what i was looking for, great documentation
Thank you for this tutorial ! However I change the command : ./config && sudo make && sudo make install to ./configure && sudo make && sudo make install .