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craibuc
Asked: 2014-11-10 10:57:46 +0800 CST

OpenVPN: correct way to use a relative path in an OVPN file

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I am attempting to connect to a service using OpenVPN.

There are a number of configuration files (.OVPN) that share a single certificate (ca.crt); all are located in the same directory. Canada.ovpn, for example:

client
dev tun
proto udp
remote ca.#########.com 443
resolv-retry 5
nobind
fast-io
float
tun-mtu 1500
tun-mtu-extra 32
mssfix 1450
persist-key
persist-tun
ca ca.crt
auth-user-pass
comp-lzo
route-delay 5 30
script-security 3 system
ping-restart 0
mute-replay-warnings
verb 3

When I attempt to connect:

sudo openvpn --config ./configs/canada.ovpn --auth-user-pass ./credentials.txt

I get an error that reads:

Options error: --ca fails with 'ca.crt': No such file or directory Options error: Please correct these errors. Use --help for more information.

It seems that openvpn is having difficultly with the relative path. I changed the relevant line to ca ./ca.crt, but that resulted in the same error.

Configuration files that have an in-line certificate work as expected.

What is the correct way to use a relative path to a certificate in an .OVPN file?

vpn

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It appears that the referenced file does not exist in the current working directory.

    Is your intention to reference a file that is also in the same directory as the config (.ovpn) file? If so, based on your command line, it does not appear that these files are actually in ./ but rather in configs/.

    As a better approach, I believe you may want to use the --cd option to have openvpn change working directories before opening any files.

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