# IrcMeetings ## Basic info - **Time:** Wednesday 3 April 2024 at 13:00 CEST (11:00 UTC) - **Place:** #openvpn-meeting channel on LiberaChat IRC network ## Topics ### Current topics - **New: live route update feature** - A client implementation will be added to OpenVPN3 core soonish. - Obviously we'll need a spec that can be agreed on for this feature. - And ideally also an openvpn2 implementation (client+server). - lev will put together a spec proposal for next meeting. - **Updated: website release process** - Waiting for a faster way to update community downloads and security advisories on the main site. - Again postponed due to issues. Now planned for this week. We'll see. - **Updated: forums topics** - ecrist still working on forums. A DNS record for the future archive address will be added, rob0 is doing this. - Plan is to soon switch URLs so new forum is on forums.openvpn.net and old forums is on archive address. - Email confirmation on registration was suggested. - We still need to work on having some other people with some admin or high mod access. - Mod guide, hard or soft delete (chuck board?), what to do with GDPR, etc. (write it down and actually make it available to mods, maybe a hidden topic) - Access for mods to logs so one can see what others did. - **Updated: mattock topics** - Separated test data from code in --dev null tests. - Also started on debian snapshot publishing but didn't get very far there yet. - Will next look at remove sudo root requirement from --dev null server-side. - Figure out if reliability can be increased further (i.e. why did it fail 4 out of 500 times). - **Closed: when to deprecate weak ciphers** - Weak ciphers like 3DES and BF-CBC - what to do with them and when? - Originally it looks like it was planned to remove in 2.7 but that may be too soon. - For example, OpenVPN Inc. still sees customers with 10+ year old installations fairly regularly. - A proposal to consider may be to deprecate it when crypto libraries deprecate it. - Weighing the expected complaints versus the low cost of just maintaining weak ciphers until crypto libraries deprecate them - the choice seems obvious. - For now, we'll stick with letting weak ciphers stay in unless there is some convincing reason to remove it. - **DCO and Linux upstreaming, API change** - Upstreaming DCO to Linux is proceeding, it is in review stage at the moment. - ordex will prepare a v3 patchset soon based on feedback received. - There will be an API change that makes it incompatible with the current implementation. - A graceful solution to that was already discussed and in motion. giaan will be working on this. - (in a nutshell, make OpenVPN understand old and new API, DKMS and kernel versions both will then use new API, then we drop old API) - **Security mailing list procedure can stand improvement** - dazo and novaflash will start discussing this internally in openvpn inc. - The goal of discussions is to work out a better internal procedure to connect the security mailing list better with company product responsible people. - **Donation collection** - ordex consulted an expert and it looks like doing a legal entity does not make sense when you're just starting out. - The tricky part here is that only if we get a lot of donations and a lot of money does it make sense to have that kind of overhead. - What we can do is start out with a company that collects the money and puts it to good community use. ordex volunteers to take this on. - We want the donations to be collected in one place, and expenses made from that one place, so we are accountable. - We need to figure out how to deal with that legally, and what payment methods to accept and how. - Probably credit card is a must. Maybe PayPal as well. Bitcoin seems to encounter some resistance in the discussions. - And a reminder; we definitely do not want the donation thing to be forced - have a mechanism to do it, but keep it out of the way. - **Status of SBOM** - There was a discussion between MaxF and djpig and others. - For OpenVPN2 / OpenVPN-NL, there is not much overlap, as OpenVPN2 doesn't ship much in terms of libraries, but OpenVPN-NL does. - The interesting use-case for an SBOM is really the OpenVPN Windows GUI client. - **Status of trac/wiki** - No progress since the last meeting. - This will probably have to wait until "--dev null" is done - Should have access controls so only approved members can edit. - **Tunnelcrack progress [TunnelCrack community wiki article](wiki:TunnelCrack)** - Current status: when mitigations start appearing we will mention them in meeting notes. - **OpenVPN community meetup 2024** - Naming: We decided to rename from 'Hackathon' to 'OpenVPN community meetup'. This has a more open spirit to it, as we want to encourage developers and those interested in contributing to feel welcome. - Where: Karlsruhe, Germany. It is a relatively central location in Europe and is fairly easily reachable by train. A meeting location is yet to be arranged. - When: At the moment tentatively set to 20-22 September 2024. - Who: We'll do an open invitation to the openvpn-devel mailing list, but also CC: specifically past attendees and people of interest. - Shirts: There is plenty of time still to prepare a shirt design. - **Static-key mini how-to is outdated.** - This page is outdated badly: [https://openvpn.net/community-resources/static-key-mini-howto/](https://openvpn.net/community-resources/static-key-mini-howto/) - The company will send this to a tech writer to redo based on [https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn/blob/master/doc/man-sections/example-fingerprint.rst](https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn/blob/master/doc/man-sections/example-fingerprint.rst) info and also retain a link to that GitHub doc. - Having a simple guide online will help adoption - **OpenVPN 2.6 performance results.** - Tests should cover: gre, ipsec, userland, dco - Linux, FreeBSD, Windows - Requires time to be dedicated to doing this, when time available will do it - **What's going on with new taskbar icons?** - Matt provided icons in [https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn-gui/issues/595](https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn-gui/issues/595) - Last update: will be picked up by selva when he has time - **Software code signing topic** - The company switched EV code signing to cloudhsm, this is the same cert type we use for driver signing, is also suitable for binary signing. - In the future, we could possibly switch the community to that same key. Saves having to maintain 2 different keys. - Depends on how hard/easy it is to access the company key signing thing from community infrastructure. - Also, no high priority at the moment, we have a working solution now. - **Management interface documentation on the main website will be updated with info from doc/management-notes.txt** - Novaflash will pick this up at some point ## Mattock topics ### --dev null server testing Mattock has improved so-called "--dev null server testing" and integrated it with "make check". The features are: - Does what it says on the tin - Mostly operating-system agnostic - Should be POSIX shell compliant but uses Bash now - Uses the sample certificates and keys - Supports running directly as root and with sudo - Supports using different OpenVPN client versions - The "current" (just compiled) version - Any other OpenVPN versions (must be present on the filesystem) - Support testing for success as well as failure - Test cases (client configurations) and server setups (server configurations) are stored in a configuration file, i.e. data and code have been separated - Configuration file format is nearly identical to t_client.rc configuration Here's how it works: 1. **make check** 1. **t_server_null.sh** 1. **t_server_null_server.sh** - Launches the compiled OpenVPN server instances as root (if necessary with sudo) - OpenVPN servers exit when all clients have disconnected from all servers 1. **t_server_null_client.sh** - Launches each individual client test - The client kills itself after some delay using an "--up" script Current PoC code is available in mattock's "dev_null" branch. A good starting point is [t_server_null.sh](https://github.com/mattock/openvpn/blob/dev_null/tests/t_server_null.sh). Mattock is improving test success rates now. When servers (due to a bug) did not exit in between stress tests reliability was 100%. However, with that bug fixed, the best reliability so far was 99%. As normal "make check" will involve spinning up new servers, the 99% reliability number is the number we should be looking at. It seems that the connection failures are caused by clients who try to connect to a server that is not yet up and/or when it is no longer running. Better synchronization between clients and servers is needed. Checking for the presence of server pid files may or may not help there. ### Debian/Ubuntu snapshot publishing - In the last meeting, we agreed to publish snapshot Debian/Ubuntu packages on build.openvpn.net. - The tool to use to publish is [aptly](https://www.aptly.info/) - Aptly does not have direct support for running commands (e.g. rsync, scp) after publishing packages, e.g. to a local filesystem on the buildmaster - **Option 1 (hacky):** use inotifywait with rsync or scp to copy the published repo to build.openvpn.net - **Option 2 (less hacky):** use NFS to publish "directly" to build.openvpn.net - Both options require a fair amount of tinkering - Mattock moved this forward a bit at the buildbot end (get the files out from workers).