Hi Selva, hi Gert,
Le 08/08/2023 à 19:07, Selva Nair a écrit :
Hi Bruno,
Another reason which incited me to continue using the "Connect"
client
was the fact that for rather old people not very accustomed to
VPNs and
the like (my "customers" are mostly retired people in their
sixties or
seventies), having a big window open, with a clear feedback
showing data
flowing in and out and displaying quite clearly valuable
information as
the local IP address and the server's address, seemed easier to
use and
also for me to diagnose when problems occur.
Thanks for the feedback. As Gert said, knowing what users want/expect
will help us improve the UI.
My turn to praise the quality of the exchanges on this list, and your
welcoming of a user that had remained silent until now: if I'm not
mistaken I have never posted anything here before, although I've been a
long time (and happy) user of OpenVPN, both personally and professionally.
When I had users I used to tell them to just check whether the icon
turns green and complain if it doesn't. In my case the VPN was for
access to the office/corporate network from outside, and the only
thing that mattered was whether they can access internal resources
such as files, software license servers etc. Once setup, OpenVPN-GUI
run with "silent_connection" worked very well for that. Until the next
time I decided to tweak the setup and break it.
:-)
By the way, the GUI does show the tunnel IP in the tray icon popup as
well as on the status window. But not the remote IP --- we show the
connected profile name instead.
Ok. Anyway the remote IP is seldom necessary, under normal conditions
it's not supposed to change and, as the admin, you're supposed to know
it. I've never seen a case where the problem lied in the fact that the
user had been fiddling with their config file and changed the server's IP...
Unfortunately, there is very limited space in a tray icon popup, but
we could add this to the status window which opens up when you double
click the tray icon when connected/connecting.
That would be interesting yes, despite what I just said above.
My users never could diagnose anything on their own, and I preferred
to go through the client and server logs.
Wisdom comes with age... ;-)
More seriously, the basic information displayed by "Connect" are clearly
not sufficient to diagnose a problem, but for a "go-nogo" test it's ok.
It's also true that the green icon in OpenVPN GUI can be sufficient, but
not always. I had a case yesterday, with an old config file missing the
"data-ciphers" parameter: the icon was green but with OpenVPN versions
2.6.0 and above, I had no real connectivity.
Oh, and "BREAKING NEWS": despite what I said yesterday, it turns out
that the problem my user was having with the DNS server on Windows 11
was finally not really solved, even with the "block-outside-dns" option!
But he finally found out what the root cause is: Avast ! This antivirus
seems to intercept DNS queries (nothing too strange for an AV software),
except that it seems to direct them to whatever server it wants to,
regardless of the settings. When Avast is deactivated, everything starts
to work correctly...
Regards,
Bruno
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