wiki:ManagingWindowsTAPDrivers

Version 2 (modified by Samuli Seppänen, 13 years ago) (diff)

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Introduction

The OpenVPN TAP-drivers consists of four files for each platform (32/64-bit):

  • <something>.cat: contains cryptographic signature for the actual drivers
  • <something>.sys: contains the actual driver
  • <something>.inf: contains driver metadata

If you need to run OpenVPN on Windows Vista/7 64-bit you have to use signed TAP drivers. Unless you sign them yourself, you need to extract drivers from an existing OpenVPN installer. See below for instructions.

Installing an uninstalling the TAP-drivers

Occasionally you may have to try out different versions of the Windows TAP-driver. This can be done with <openvpn-install-dir\bin\tapinstall.exe. This tool is actually a renamed Devcon.exe.

It's fairly straighforward to use tapinstall.exe from a command-prompt. The <id> is an identifier which tapinstall.exe uses to detect the correct driver. In case of OpenVPN 2.2* it's tap0901. This may be different in older/newer versions. To view information about an installer driver use

$ tapinstall.exe hwids <id>

To uninstall a driver use:

$ tapinstall.exe remove <id>

To install a new TAP-driver use

$ tapinstall.exe install <something.inf> <id>

It's also possible to extract TAP-drivers from OpenVPN installer without installing OpenVPN.

Extracting TAP-drivers from OpenVPN installers

Extracting TAP-drivers from an OpenVPN installer is relatively easy: you can use 7-zip to open the installer executable. There are both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, but the latter are larger in size.