- **Time**: Wednesday 10 April 2024 at 13:00 CEST (11:00 UTC)

- **Place**: #openvpn-meeting channel on LiberaChat IRC network

- In short, the ability to update routes, DNS, ifconfig options, live, without having to do a full reconnect.

- One example where this solves an issue is when 1000 users are connected to a server, and you change a route that applies to all. You'd end up temporarily almost DDoS-ing yourself.

- As discussed last week, Lev has put together a proposal from which we can build a specification.

- The plan is to get approval for the specification first. Then CloudConnexa/openvpn3 will get this implemented.

- In discussion with ordex it seems he and giaan can take on creating the OpenVPN2 server and client implementations.

- Proposal here: [https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/edit/w1SE-ttFQphTrgZALaG8o8YE/](https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/edit/w1SE-ttFQphTrgZALaG8o8YE/)

- DYNAMIC_ROUTES message name is too limited to just routes, we instead prefer PUSH_UPDATE.

- Initially PUSH_UPDATE will support routes, DNS, and ifconfig options, to update network related settings on the client. This could be expanded in the future.

- ecrist still working on forums. DNS record for archive of old forums was finally correctly created.

- 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

- Naming: We decided to rename from 'Hackathon' to 'OpenVPN community meetup'. This has a more open spirit to it.

- Where: Karlsruhe, Germany. Meeting room location to be determined.

- When: At the moment tentatively set to 20-22 September 2024.

- Who: We'll do an open invitation to 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.

- There's a wiki page up now where we can coordinate: [https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/CommunityMeetup2024](https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/CommunityMeetup2024)

- 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).

- 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)

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- No progress since last meeting.

- This will probably have to wait until "--dev null" is done

- Should have access controls so only approved members can edit.

- Current status: when mitigations start appearing we will mention them in meeting notes.

- 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.

- tests should cover: gre, ipsec, userland, dco

- linux, freebsd, windows

- requires time to be dedicated to doing this, when time available will do it

- 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

- 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 company key signing thingee from community infrastructure.

- also no high priority at the moment, we have a working solution now.

- novaflash will pick this up at some point

Mattock has improved the 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

- 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).

- 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)