VPN GUI: Authentication and Selection

Routers
1

  1. I see no way to easily update the VPN connections with new authentication credentials after old credentials have expired. Each time the credentials expire, I see no way to simply update the user name and password login info. Instead I’ve been using the purge option, which removes all the VPN config files and saved credentials. Then I have to add the config files again to get the opportunity to add the new credentials. This can be rather tedious with multiple services in use. Is there an easy method I’m missing? What would be really useful here is to be able to select the config file or files desired and manually update their credentials.

  2. I see it could get difficult to organize and group the VPN config files. The only organization I see now is when adding the VPN config files, you can add them in a batch method in a zip file and enter any shared/common credentials at that time. Maybe others would find it useful to be able to manually/automatically have the config files grouped and give the grouping a custom label to keep them organized. For example you could group them by their common/shared credentials, by connection protocols, by encryption, by encryption levels, by location, by ping, by speeds, or by custom fields, etc. A table/fields format could be used.

  3. I don’t see other ways of selecting which VPN config files are being used for connection, besides manual selection. I thought I read/saw examples of the firmware with some neat methods of selecting which config file to use for a connection (like a listed group priority system based on user preference, speed test, ping, encryption, protocol, etc).

  4. Currently I don’t see the firmware doing any intelligent VPN connection management. For example if the selected VPN connection fails, the firmware looks like it just keeps trying to reconnect to that selected VPN config, even if it continues to fail. It would be great if there were some intelligent strategies used so that upon a VPN connection failure, the firmware would try to connect to a different VPN config file. For example, the next VPN config file by listed group priority (be it speed test or some other criteria like location, ping, encryption, protocol, etc).

2

thanks for the suggestions.

Question 1) should be able to solve more easily. If you want to update your username and password, you can manually check /etc/openvpn/auth folder and find the file then change the content. If you have a separate cert file etc, you can also find the file in this folder. But if all your information is integrated in on ovpn file, there is no way to do it easily except to purge and re-upload. Upgrading the UI is also not difficult but need to think carefully.

Question 2, 3 and 4 are actually the same thing. In order to do a intelligent VPN management, we need to check the speed of each config first then classify. We may find a way to ping the port first and get the latency. We tried some method but efficiency is not high. So need to write specified program to do this.

So all these can be done. The first problem is: is it really necessary to spend so much effect to achieve this? We are not vpn service providers so all our analysis will be like in blackbox.