OpenVpn connection and possible issues

Dmytro Tus

Full Stack Web developer

Connect via OpenVPN

I am, as a developer often have to connect via VPN to the database. Very ofter I am also using openvpn

The command to run the vpn connection looks like below

sudo openvpn --config myConfig.ovpn

The file myConfig.ovpn looks like this

client
remote someremoteaddress.com

route-delay 2

ca [inline]
cert [inline]
key [inline]

<ca>
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
</ca>

<cert>
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
</cert>

<key>
-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
-----END PRIVATE KEY-----
</key>

When the connection is succed we can work with vpn. 

Issues with OpenVpn

Sometimes the session with opened vpn connection didn't close correctly, and then connection to the vpn server can't be done in the correct way. At that moment we can see the success in our command line interface but vpn doesn't work.

How to resolve the issue.

First, I can check the active connections from my machine 

ps aux | grep openvpn 

## output
....another connections
username        91566   0,0  0,0 450724640   1632 s000  S+   12:44     0:00.01 grep openvpn

If we will see some another connections which we don't want, we can just remove them using the key

sudo kill 91566  

After that just reconnect to the remove VPN and everything should work.

Happy codding 🥳