Background / My Setup¶

• My VPN provider allows me 10 connections.
• I have 10 OpenVPN clients setup to use my VPN provider.
• These clients are assigned to interfaces.
• The interfaces are assigned to gateways.
• The gateways are assigned into to 2 gateway groups (Scraping and Privacy)

The issue¶

When I disabled an OpenVPN client manually I want this client to stay disabled after a reboot.

• I do not want to manually remove and re-add OpenVPN clients to get the desired effect because it took a lot of time to get these setup right.
• I can manually disable any of the VPN clients using the pfSense GUI and they stay disabled as expected, however if I reboot my pfSense router then all of the VPN connections are brought backup.
• This is an issue because if I now want to use a VPN connection using my VPN providers software on another device I have to make sure that I manually disable a connection in pfsense to free up a seat becasue I am limited to 10 connections
• I don't always need all of the connections up all the time in pfSense so I manually disable them when I am not using them. this is also another reason for this feature request.

What I have tried¶

• Shellcmd
  • 
  • Problem with this is that these scripts do not always fire after the VPN connections are made so this method is not reliable
  • If these commands run before the relevant VPN daemon is running they will have no effect.

• VPN --> OpenVPN --> Clients --> Edit
  • 
  • This method does not work because you cannot disable an OpenVPN client when it is assigned to an interface.
  • For the Redmine searchers: Cannot disable an OpenVPN instance while the interface is assigned. Remove the interface assignment first.

Proposed solutions / ideas¶

• Add ability to disable an OpenVPN client that is still attached to an interface
• Fix the Shellcmd plugin so it can disable OpenVPN connections.
  • perhaps add another option called After Boot and to go one further this option could have a delay timer on it just incase there are things that cannot be probed for such as OpenVPN connections.
• Add an ability to set the OpenVPN client service start type to Manual so after a reboot the OpenVPN client service will not automatically restart

Related links¶

• https://forum.netgate.com/topic/176435/disable-openvpn-clients-on-reboot
  • This is my post on using Shellcmd
• #13769 - Shellcmd Package - Add Copy Command
• #13770 - Shellcmd package - Add Enable/Disable option
• #14211 - OpenVPN Status page (Stop|Start|Restart) - Use Ajax instead of full page reload.
• #13758 - OpenVPN service names inconsistent - Hard to get OpenVPN ID for CLi