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Re: [Openvpn-users] how many connections?


  • Subject: Re: [Openvpn-users] how many connections?
  • From: "James Yonan" <jim@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 21:02:13 -0000

Doug Lytle <support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

> Chris,
> 
> I'm still waiting on a response from my last question.  I have not been 
> able to get more then 1 tun device and 1 tap device to work 
> concurrently, but I am sure others have.  I want to support not more 
> then 10 tap devices.  I would guess that James has been a bit busy as of 
> late or we'd be seeing more posts from him.
> 
> I'm hoping, givin time, we'll both get our questions answered.

OpenVPN supports any number of concurrent tunnels.  Each tunnel must have:

* its own port number (--port)
* its own tun/tap interface (--dev and/or --dev-node)
* a separate OpenVPN process and configuration file (--config)

On Linux 2.4, tun and tap devices are created dynamically, and it is possible
to have more than 100 tun/tap interfaces.

On Windows, tun/tap interfaces must be created manually before usage.  It's
pretty easy, there's a start menu item for it.  I'm not sure what the limit is
under Windows, but I would guess that it's less than Linux.

The above approach has its strengths and weaknesses.  The key strength is that
handling one tunnel per OpenVPN process and requiring a separate port number
and tun/tap interface for each tunnel makes the code simple, modular, and easy
to maintain.  It also makes the OS kernel do more of the heavy lifting such as
handling the routing between tun/tap interfaces, implementing bridging, etc. 
The weakness is that OpenVPNs scalability is constrained by the OS's ability
to handle larger numbers of tun/tap interfaces, and by the complexity of
needing to maintain a larger number of configuration files.

A key feature which is not yet available in 1.5.0 but I expect some time down
the road is "point-to-multipoint" mode which has been discussed and argued at
length on this list.

In this mode, a single OpenVPN process, running on a single UDP port,
controlling a single tun/tap interface will be able to drive a large number of
tunnels to different peers.  This type of model should be able to scale to
thousands of tunnels (assuming that the processor and memory are up to task).

James


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