OpenVPN version 1.x is available in the universe reposiroty. apt-get install openvpn will do the necessary.

Although OpenVPN version 2 is still at beta stage at the time of writing, it is already in use quite widely (my employers have been using it for a while on both windows and linux clients).

If you want (or need, as release 2 has some functionality not in version 1) to go for version 2. You can download the source code from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openvpn/

You'll need to install a couple of packages that the confiure script looks for:

apt-get install libssl-dev liblzo-dev

Unzip the source file and change directory into the newly created openvpn-2.0_rcXX directory (where XX is the current release number), then it's just a case of

./configure
make
sudo make install

That's about it, now you just need to set up your config file and certs somewhere convenient

sudo mkdir /etc/openvpn

and then specify your config file as a command line argument

openvpn --with-config=

notes

for it to work properly you need the tun module in your kernel make sure the firewall allows vpn instructions for creating a tap

CategoryDocumentation