Certificate Authority Setup from the Ubuntu Server Guide by OnWorks

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1.2.1. Certificate Authority Setup

To setup your own Certificate Authority (CA) and generating certificates and keys for an OpenVPN server and multiple clients first copy the easy-rsa directory to /etc/openvpn. This will ensure that any changes to the scripts will not be lost when the package is updated. From a terminal change to user root and:

mkdir /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/

cp -r /usr/share/easy-rsa/* /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/

Next, edit /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/vars adjusting the following to your environment:

export KEY_COUNTRY="US" export KEY_PROVINCE="NC"

export KEY_CITY="Winston-Salem" export KEY_ORG="Example Company" export KEY_EMAIL="[email protected]" export KEY_CN=MyVPN

export KEY_ALTNAMES=AltMyVPN export KEY_NAME=MyVPN

export KEY_OU=MyVPN

Enter the following to generate the master Certificate Authority (CA) certificate and key:

cd /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/ source vars

./clean-all

./build-ca

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