So whats the current state of OpenVPN and why cant it hook up to any of the popular public VPN services ?
Im kinda stunned that only PPTP works and thats of course not secure.
I cant believe Mikrotik has not gotten OpenVPN to work 3 years after the first complaints to this forum occurred. So Mikrotik is never going to support public VPNs like NordVPN or IPVanish ?
There is an other thread about this, so have a search. I would also would this happen but I learned to be patient with Mikrotik and they could then surprise you.
The funny thing is that my satellite receiver (TV/radio) can do OpenVPN to Vanish and I could use it as gateway or the Raspberry will gateway it through the Mikrotik.
Both devices use Debian so installing a fully functioning OpenVPN client is a breeze.
Jeeze so a Raspberry Pi will do it no problem, but, Mikrotik cant ? I did lots of searching on this and saw 4 threads going back to 2011. This is not a new issue. It needs to be addressed. Kinda shocking considering how current Mikrotik is with all the current networking standards. I was pretty disappointed.
Not much changed since OpenVPN was first added to RouterOS. It’s still incomplete, with most notable missing features being UDP and LZO. Unfortunately, those are used on almost any random server you encounter. Originally it looked very bad, as according to Normis, developers were committing suicide left and right, specifically because of OpenVPN (ok, it’s not exact quote, and I might have stretched it a little 
). Things got better since than and UDP support was promised for RouterOS v7. But as you might know if you follow this forum, v7 is this magical thing that will come one day, but no one knows when it might be. It doesn’t seem there’s any technical reason why it would need to wait for v7 and couldn’t happen sooner. But there’s no indication of progress so far. I get it, it’s all about priorities, and OpenVPN is hardly #1. On the other hand, it does seems to be one of popular ones.
i wonder why this was so hard to do ? DD-WRT has it. You can do it yourself using Ubiquity Edge Router. You can do this on any computer OS. You can do it on a Raspberry Pi.
This is the first time ive ever been disappointed with Mikrotik. I was all excited to go get my first public VPN and hook that to the router. Luckily I google mikrotik and the VPNs and discovered a lot of people trying to get it working and none could.
I guess i dont understand how it could be so hard when its so easy on various *nix platforms ? Technically, why was this difficult ?
The usual way is to take official OpenVPN source code and you’re done, the end. But MikroTik, if I’m not mistaken, implemented their own OpenVPN client from scratch. I’m not sure why, if they wanted better control, or because of licencing reasons. Not that I would understand the latter, because OpenVPN is under GPL and MikroTik uses other GPL software (most notably Linux kernel as base for RouterOS), so it should not be a problem. It would be nice if someone from MikroTik sumbled upon this thread and provided some info.
Well you would not want to rewrite a security tested piece of open source ? Thats like deciding to rewrite OpenSSL. Thats a bad idea. Thats kinda odd as one possible reason would be to put in backdoors and open holes in it. Hmmm… Thats odd…
Yes I would want to hear from Mikrotik on why this is delayed and if they decided to write their own OpenVPN client why they would do that ? Also of course what 3rd party testing was done on the code ?
Dont get my wrong. I LUV Mikrotik and would literally never use anything else. My shock was that Mikrotik could not do this simple thing. To me that was just kinda crazy and its hard to even believe. Ive come to expect Mikrotik to have everything, so I was really surprized it could not hook to a public VPN.
Any update on this now that we are on 6.41 ? Whats the plan for this ?
No change since last time. Udp support said to be in v7, nobody revoked it nor promissed anything new. No news about v7 release date.