OpenVPN portable
If you want to create a portable OpenVPN setup for accessing a VPN from anywhere, I will show you how to do it yourself.
In order to connect to a VPN, you probably have received 4 files from your network administrator:
- CA certificate (ca.crt)
- connection config file (.ovpn)
- your personal certificate (username.crt)
- your private key (username.key)
You may or may not have received a server certificate. If you have, add it to the list. From now on, we will call these files “the connection files”.
Start by downloading the most current version of OpenVPN. It’s an EXE installation package, unfortunately there’s no ZIP archive available. You need to install it, copy the “bin” and ”driver” folders somewhere safe, and then uninstall. These two folders are all that you need.
Open the 2 BAT files (addtap.bat and deltapall.bat) and remove all absolute paths like “C:\\Program Files\\OpenVPN”. The reference to the TAP driver should be “..\\driver\\OemWin2k.inf”.
Copy all the “connection files” to the \\bin folder and create a new BAT file, for example “start.bat” containing a single line like this:
openvpn client.ovpn
Replace “client.ovpn” with your .ovpn file.
To open the connection, first install the TAP driver by starting “addtap.bat”. Then start “start.bat”. Now you should be able to connect to the VPN! You can copy this setup to a USB drive and carry it in your pocket.
I have created a sample setup for you, containing version 2.0.9 of OpenVPN. You can download it from here.