How can I map a network share after a successful client VPN connection?

Question

I've been recently tasked with providing VPN functionality for some "road-warriors" at my workplace. I'm running a CentOS 5.4 Linux server. I've chosen OpenVPN as my VPN server and have successfully deployed and tested several Windows XP and 7 clients. I've thus been able to manually map a network share. At this point, all connections are successful and stable.

What I'm seeking to do is to be able to automatically run a batch file that will create the network share once the VPN tunnel has been successfully setup. How do I do this?

I've read a bit about the up or route-up commands from the OpenVPN Man Page but I can't seem to figure out how to call the batch file. Any assistance would be helpful.

Answer 1

If the share names are the same all the time then you could map them within in the OS all the time and they would be in a disconnected state until the user is on the VPN. This how we do it and it works well.

Looking at the man page I suspect this is what you need on the command line

--up c:\script.bat

below is the section

--up cmd
Shell command to run after successful TUN/TAP device open (pre --user UID change). The up script is useful for specifying route commands which route IP traffic destined for private subnets which exist at the other end of the VPN connection into the tunnel.
For --dev tun execute as:

cmd tun_dev tun_mtu link_mtu ifconfig_local_ip ifconfig_remote_ip [ init | restart ]

For --dev tap execute as:

cmd tap_dev tap_mtu link_mtu ifconfig_local_ip ifconfig_netmask [ init | restart ]

See the "Environmental Variables" section below for additional parameters passed as environmental variables.

Note that cmd can be a shell command with multiple arguments, in which case all OpenVPN-generated arguments will be appended to cmd to build a command line which will be passed to the shell.

Typically, cmd will run a script to add routes to the tunnel.

Normally the up script is called after the TUN/TAP device is opened. In this context, the last command line parameter passed to the script will be init. If the --up-restart option is also used, the up script will be called for restarts as well. A restart is considered to be a partial reinitialization of OpenVPN where the TUN/TAP instance is preserved (the --persist-tun option will enable such preservation). A restart can be generated by a SIGUSR1 signal, a --ping-restart timeout, or a connection reset when the TCP protocol is enabled with the --proto option. If a restart occurs, and --up-restart has been specified, the up script will be called with restart as the last parameter.

The following standalone example shows how the --up script can be called in both an initialization and restart context. (NOTE: for security reasons, don't run the following example unless UDP port 9999 is blocked by your firewall. Also, the example will run indefinitely, so you should abort with control-c).

openvpn --dev tun --port 9999 --verb 4 --ping-restart 10 --up 'echo up' --down 'echo down' --persist-tun --up-restart

Note that OpenVPN also provides the --ifconfig option to automatically ifconfig the TUN device, eliminating the need to define an --up script, unless you also want to configure routes in the --up script.

If --ifconfig is also specified, OpenVPN will pass the ifconfig local and remote endpoints on the command line to the --up script so that they can be used to configure routes such as:

route add -net 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw $5

Then maybe one for down to remove the mapped drives