OpenVPN Community on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

## OpenVPN Community on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

OpenVPN Community Edition is the classic open source SSL/TLS VPN daemon: a routed, certificate authenticated VPN that gives remote clients a secure encrypted tunnel into your Azure network and out to the internet. This cloudimg image ships only the GPL 2.0 Community Edition (never the proprietary Access Server), running the current stable OpenVPN 2.6 line from the Ubuntu 24.04 archive under systemd as the unprivileged nobody user, with unattended security upgrades kept enabled. Backed by 24/7 expert support.

No Shipped Keys, a Per Instance PKI

A VPN image that shipped baked in private keys would let anyone with the image impersonate the server or decrypt traffic, so this image never ships any key material. On the first boot of every VM a fresh elliptic curve certificate authority, server and client certificates, and tls-crypt key are generated, so no two VMs share key material and nothing private exists in the captured image.

Ready to Connect Out of the Box

First boot assembles a complete inline client configuration at /root/client1.ovpn whose remote already points at your VM public IP. Copy it to a client and connect immediately, then add your own per client certificates for real users. Client internet egress is configured out of the box with IP forwarding and an nftables masquerade.

What is Included

* OpenVPN 2.6 current stable line from the Ubuntu 24.04 archive, run under systemd as openvpn-server@server

* Routed UDP VPN on port 1194 with AES-256-GCM, a tls-crypt protected control channel, TLS 1.2 minimum, and an elliptic curve PKI

* A per instance PKI generated on first boot (no shared or shipped keys), stored on a dedicated 20 GiB Azure data disk at /var/lib/openvpn-pki

* A ready to use inline client config at /root/client1.ovpn pointing at your VM public IP

* Client internet egress via IP forwarding and an nftables masquerade, persisted across reboot

* A tiny nginx health endpoint on port 80 for Azure Load Balancer probes

Use Cases

Secure remote access VPN for your team, a site to cloud tunnel into your Azure VNet, a full tunnel egress gateway, and a fully controlled open source alternative to hosted VPN services.

OpenVPN Community Edition is licensed under the GPL 2.0. cloudimg is not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenVPN Inc. This image ships the open source Community Edition, not the proprietary Access Server. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and are used only to identify the software.