On Fri, 10 Dec 2004, Steve Palm wrote: > Greetings! > > For the past week or so I've been working on a GUI client for MacOS X. > I just happened to check the website today and saw the new release with > the management interface. VERY COOL, and this will make my life MUCH > easier. I had saved the process of looking at all the return strings > for last to parse them from the running process, now I have a much > smaller set of things to worry about. ;-) > > One question, though... Is there a way to have all of the information > in a config file yet when you start the openvpn program it won't build > the tunnel until it gets a "go" from the management interface? The > trouble I'm trying to avoid is that there is an indeterminate amount of > time between telling the openvpn client instance to launch and being > able to connect to the management interface port. I don't want to loose > the messages I might need during that interval.
That sort of already happens now if you use --management-query-passwords -- though I agree it would be useful to have a more generic mechanism for starting OpenVPN in a hibernated state until it receives a "start" message from the mangagement interface. > I suppose I could do "state all on" and parse the two forms (immediate > feedback and real-time notifications), but it would be much simpler to > fire the openvpn process, wait a second or two for it to stabilize, then > try to connect at which point I just do a "state on" and "start tunnel" > or something. > > Also, which of the multitude of configuration options would be most > useful to put into a GUI? Right now I have an embedded template config > file (which can be edited) that has placeholders for values the GUI > will fill in. I'm using: host, port, protocol, http-proxy-host, > http-proxy-port, and a management routine that stores certificates, > allows you pick which certs go with which configs, etc... I've modelled > the thing almost entirely visually after the program IPSecuritas (a free > IPSec client for MacOS X) because we're migrating from IPSec to OpenVPN > and I wanted it to be as transparent to our users as possible. > > Anyway, awesome work, and I look forward to feedback on making the MacOS > X GUI as good as I'm able to. :-) Cool, are you going to focus on the client side only, or make the GUI capable of driving an OpenVPN server daemon as well? (The management interface supports both). James
