Why is my OpenVPN certificate not valid?

What is the lifetime of OpenVPN certificate?

Hi folks. I am looking for how long the server certificate for my OpenVPN server should be valid? Currently we are testing our setup and I wanted to know what the lifetime for the server certificate (aka tls client certificate) on the client machines is. I found the recommendation to be 365 days, however I'm reading at where someone mention 86321 day's (8 hours/32 year). What is correct ?
Thanks in advance. Thank you for your reply. I've actually used the 360-day lifetime suggested in various tutorials on this site (for a period of time up to a month). As it worked fine in our testing, I just didn't notice any warning message regarding the validity of the certificate that might appear in the future. For the last 4 years or so, we have seen no negative side-effects associated with these (very short) certificates: they look quite robust. I did ask the person who suggested the shorter certificate lifetime on our forum, but he said he didn't know about it. Can someone please confirm this information?

I'd be interested in the answer to the question too! My guess is that it depends on several factors, most notably the size and version of OpenVPN as well as individual user configuration like certificates, caching, etc. I haven't tested this myself.

This page: seems to be answer to how long you can keep it. But maybe this was a mistake/misunderstanding of the poster, you could double check it for better certainty.

When I first setup my server and installed OpenVPN, the client was given a 180 day certificate, if you wanted to give them less, you needed to edit the .ovpn file and go down to the line specifying the length of the cert, you could then make the change.

Also, I don't think there is a way to generate certs that will auto-renew and be valid for a specific amount of time as opposed to forever, but there may be a way to do this using the client certificates.

Why is my OpenVPN certificate not valid?

I'm new to OpenVPN. This is my server: Server: 192.168.99.100 (192.100)
Port: 80. Interface: tun0. If I use nmap to scan the VPN from another server, the OpenVPN works fine. I do not get a "connection refused" from the client in the OpenVPN GUI.0 (X11; Linux x8664) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/43.2357.130 Safari/537.36" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d @/var/lib/openvpn/server.cert
Curl: (65) OpenSSL SSLconnect: SSLERRORSYSCALL in connection to 192.50.51.2

Any thoughts on why this might be happening? The client was attempting to connect to the IP 192.100, which is outside of the VPN. By default, you only get to the inside of the VPN when a port is specified.

What is OpenVPN certificate?

In order to make sure that our users are secure and our communication is not being tapped on, we're using the OpenVPN protocol. OpenVPN is an application-layer VPN protocol which allows two parties to establish a secure channel in which they can talk to each other securely. It does this by encrypting all traffic between two machines, so that if any third party were to look at the traffic, they would not be able to see it. The OpenVPN protocol is open-source, free, and widely used.

What is a certificate? A certificate is basically a digital signature of an electronic document. It is used to verify the identity of the person organization who owns it. In essence, it is like your passport: the only way to recognize someone is by their passport. A digital certificate is a signature of a message that can be digitally verified. Digital signatures can be used for various purposes: for example, to authenticate who you are (your passport), to confirm that you are the owner of the document (your email account), or to prove that you are allowed to access a network (your computer's IP address).

How does an OpenVPN certificate work? To understand how certificates work, we need to look at the three components that are important for a certificate to work: The Certificate Authority. An authority is a trusted third party that is authorized to issue certificates. An example of a certificate authority is Verisign, which is a trusted third party that issues certificates to websites like Google and Yahoo. Every certificate issued by an authority is bound to it. This is also known as the issuer or owner of the certificate.

Issuer. An issuer is the person organization that owns the certificate. An example of an issuer is Google, the company that owns Gmail.

Subject. A subject is the person organization that the certificate issued to. For example, when I buy a certificate from Verisign, the subject is Google.

Certificates can be either self-signed or signed by a CSelf-signed certificates are verified by the recipient. Signed certificates are verified by the CIn most cases, a CA is not trusted by default; for example, if you visit Gmail with a self-signed certificate, you will be shown a warning stating that it cannot be trusted.