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#0
Learn OpenVPN - Pre-Requisites Skills & Setup Environment
The opening episode of the Learn OpenVPN series. You ensure your foundational skills in networking, Linux, and TLS, then install OpenVPN, Easy-RSA, and OpenSSL on two or three VMs before building your first VPN lab.
August 10, 2026
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#1
Learn OpenVPN - History, Background & Why OpenVPN
This episode traces the evolution of VPNs from IPsec and PPTP toward the birth of OpenVPN in 2001, the problems it solved, and its mass adoption by Cloudflare WARP and corporate VPNs to this day.
August 10, 2026
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#2
Learn OpenVPN - Core Concepts & Main Architecture
This episode dissects the OpenVPN architecture: key exchange over SSL/TLS, data channel encryption, UDP 1194 or TCP 443 encapsulation, the difference between tun and tap modes, and the main server and client components.
August 10, 2026
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#3
Learn OpenVPN - Installation & Initial Setup
The first hands-on episode: installing OpenVPN on various platforms, understanding the OpenSSL and LZO dependencies, writing your first server.conf and client.ovpn, then verifying the tunnel is alive with ping.
August 10, 2026
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#4
Learn OpenVPN - PKI & Certificate Management (Easy-RSA)
This episode builds the OpenVPN Public Key Infrastructure from scratch with Easy-RSA: PKI initialization, creating a CA, issuing server and client certificates, Diffie-Hellman parameters, CRL, and alternatives such as the OpenSSL CLI and XCA.
August 10, 2026
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#5
Learn OpenVPN - Authentication: Certificates vs PSK vs Username/Password
This episode dissects OpenVPN's three authentication layers: mutual TLS with X.509 certificates, pre-shared keys with tls-auth and tls-crypt, and username/password authentication with auth-user-pass and auth-gen-token.
August 10, 2026
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#6
Learn OpenVPN - Routing & IP Forwarding
This episode covers the journey of packets inside the tunnel: distributing routes to clients with push, per-client subnetting with iroute, the difference between tun and tap modes, and IP forwarding and NAT with iptables so clients can access external networks.
August 10, 2026
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#7
Learn OpenVPN - Control Channel & Data Channel
This episode dissects the two communication paths in OpenVPN: the control channel that handles the TLS handshake and renegotiation, and the data channel that encrypts traffic with modern ciphers such as AES-256-GCM and ChaCha20-Poly1305.
August 10, 2026
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#8
Learn OpenVPN - Logging, Monitoring & Troubleshooting
This episode covers the tools and techniques for observing OpenVPN: the status, log, verb, and mute directives for logging, the management interface for runtime inspection, and tcpdump and verb 6 for tracing TLS handshake failures and routing problems.
August 10, 2026
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#9
Learn OpenVPN - Client Config Distribution (CCD) & Per-Client Policy
This episode covers how to give each client different configuration: the client-config-dir directive, the client-connect and client-disconnect scripts as lifecycle hooks, and static IP allocation with ifconfig-push and iroute.
August 10, 2026
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