Several people have opened support tickets recently asking about warning messages being produced by OpenVPN when connecting to Informatics.  The reason for these warnings has been that the configuration syntax has gradually changed over time to accommodate new features, and the form we have in our configuration files is now deprecated and will be removed in new versions.

We have, therefore, been revising our configuration files to take account of these changes, and the new versions are now available for beta-testing.  If you would like to do so you can download them from here, or by AFS from /afs/inf.ed.ac.uk/group/inf-unit/OpenVPN/NewConfig/.  Please select the versions appropriate for the platform you are using.  For iOS (and perhaps also Android) a simple alternative approach is to email the configuration files to yourself as attachments, though you may have to adjust the MIME type to have your mail client recognise them as OpenVPN configuration files.

The format of the files’ names has been changed slightly to make it clearer what each file actually does. It’s now

    Informatics-<routes>-<site>.ovpn

where “routes” is one of “EdLAN” (which sends EdLAN addresses through the tunnel), “InfNets” (which sends a selection of Informatics addresses through the tunnel) or “AllNets” (which sends everything through the tunnel), and “site” is one of “Forum” or “AT”.  (There are two additional sites, “DR” or “DEV”, which are for test and development of the service only.  Please just ignore these.)  This also allows the new files to be installed alongside the old one, to simplify testing.

All feedback welcome.  Please send your comments using the support form in the usual way.

OpenVPN beta-testers wanted / Computing Systems by is licensed under a