On Wed, 30 Jun 2004, Jan Kiszka wrote:
PS: Has anyone ever thought about some small GUI (taskbar icon with
some dialogs) for Windows, KDE, etc. to make the handling of multiple
configurations and the status display easier in a roadwarrior
scenario?
I just started working on such an application last night. I'm kinda new
to C programming in Windows so I ran into a little annoying problem
right away though!
While considering a similar interface for some other project, I once
took a closer look at wxWindows (http://www.wxwindows.org). Before you
start hacking your own message handling routines in C or switching over
to the Windows-only MFC library, this project may be worth some thoughts
because
A) it capsulates most of the annoying GUI work, and
B) it opens to possiblity to port your work later to Linux as well!
I think not only Windows users would appreciate a simple management
interface for OpenVPN clients very much...
The only problem so far: You have to consider writing your program
object-oriented, i.e. in C++. Did you ever worked with some OO languages
(Java e.g.)?
No, I'm not used to OO languages, unfortunally. The reasons why I started
to write this in C was:
1) I only know how to code in C, VisualBasic and Assembler. Assembler is
out of the question, and I'm tired of VBs dependency for a bunch of DLLs.
I like beeing able to compile just one compact exe file and not need to
create an installation package just to get the application working on
another machine.
2) The egoistic one! I've though of learning to develop windows gui
applications in C for a long time, but never really got to it. Now I saw
an opportunity to write something useful and learn something I've wanted
to learn at the same time.
3) OpenVPN is written in traditional C, so if I for any reason would like
to integrate the gui into the openvpn binary, that would be very easy if
the gui itself was written in C.
4) I like traditional C, and dislike object oriented languages! Don't ask
me why, it's just my personal taste, and I can fully understand that other
prefer OO languages...
I do agree with you though that makeing it portable would have been
prefered, but just like you, I don't got that much spare time, so I'm not
sure that I want to spend it learning yet another development environment.
James, do you put any preferance in what language/environment a gui for
OpenVPN is developed in, if you would distribute it together with the main
application in the future?
On Wed, 30 Jun 2004, James Yonan wrote:
I would furthermore suggest to discuss the required interface between
the GUI and the OpenVPN daemon on this list. Starting and stopping would
be possibly by just running the main binary, but I think a more
sophisticated status and diagnosis interface requires some other
mechanism (e.g. a local socket). Such an interface could furthermore
prevent that the actual user who switches some configuration or just
checks the status must own superuser privileges to start/stop a OpenVPN
service and - even worse - read the secret key files.
Yes, I would like to see some kind of interface for control of OpenVPN from
external programs.
The mechanism of the interface would be a socket on *nix or a named pipe on
Windows.
The interface would primarily be for interaction with a GUI agent and would
allow for:
* Stop/Restart control
* Get status (like SIGUSR2)
* Provide authentication info
That's great news. That was one of my concerns the other night, how to
communicate with OpenVPN to check the status.
--
_____________________________________________________________
Mathias Sundman (^) ASCII Ribbon Campaign
NILINGS AB X NO HTML/RTF in e-mail
Tel: +46-(0)8-666 32 28 / \ NO Word docs in e-mail
