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Once these programs are installed and have been moved to the right locations on your system, the next step is to create a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) on the OpenVPN server so that you can request and manage TLS certificates for clients and other servers that will connect to your VPN. As a result, any updates to the easy-rsa package will be automatically reflected in your PKI’s scripts.įinally, ensure the directory’s owner is your non-root sudo user and restrict access to that user using chmod: Note: While other guides might instruct you to copy the easy-rsa package files into your PKI directory, this tutorial adopts a symlink approach.
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Now you will need to create a symlink from the easyrsa script that the package installed into the ~/easy-rsa directory that you just created: Next you will need to create a new directory on the OpenVPN Server as your non-root user called ~/easy-rsa: Both packages are available in Ubuntu’s default repositories, so you can use apt for the installation: To start off, update your OpenVPN Server’s package index and install OpenVPN and Easy-RSA. Easy-RSA is a public key infrastructure (PKI) management tool that you will use on the OpenVPN Server to generate a certificate request that you will then verify and sign on the CA Server. The first step in this tutorial is to install OpenVPN and Easy-RSA. See How to Set Up SSH Keys on Ubuntu 20.04 for instructions on how to perform either of these solutions. Alternatively, you could generate an SSH keypair for each server, then add the OpenVPN Server’s public SSH key to the CA machine’s authorized_keys file and vice versa. To resolve this issue, you could re-enable password authentication on each server. Note: Please note that if you disable password authentication while configuring these servers, you may run into difficulties when transferring files between them later on in this guide.
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