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. 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. :-) Steve
