Building openvpn with enable-password-save on windows

If you are looking to download openvpn 2.1.1 with enable-password-save you should check this post.
I have added a few updates on how to build openvpn 2.1.1 on this post

Although I know it’s against security best practices I have just finished building my own version of open vpn 2.1 RC 13 passing the --enable-password-save option (you may download it from here). Thus I can now save the credentials in a plain text file. If you can’t acquire private keys and you don’t care about security that much or you think that you can trust your credentials in a plain text file in your computer, you may also build your own openvpn following the following instructions.
First of all I acquired a fresh copy of a virtual hard disk containing windows xp (you may find some already installed vhd drives here). In order to open the vhd file you’ll be needing Virtual pc.

So we do have a virtual pc running and we install the following programs:

1. MinGW/MSYS environment
   
   You must download the MinGW setup. This exe will download the required files and then install them. Although I am not sure whether all these were needed, I installed the core compiler, Objective C Compiler and MinGW Make.
   Having installed MinGW you must download and install msys following the steps from the official site
2. Nullsoft Install System will be needed to create the install file

That’s all the tools we will need. Now let’s download some source files. Since the whole process of gathering all the required source files and compiling open vpn is very intense, we will be using the latest prebuild package which will save us some time. Extract the contents of the tbz using your favorite extractor (mine is 7-zip) in your msys home folder (if you haven’t changed anything during the setup this should be C:\msys\1.0\home\admin\ ). The following folders should exist:

• gen-prebuilt
• lzo-2.02
• openssl-0.9.8i
• pkcs11-helper
• openvpn-2.1_rc13

Having the prebuild ready, download the source files. Extract the source files inside the openvpn-2.1_rc13 folder, thus ending up with a bunch of .c (source) and .h (header) files in the root of that folder. Enter the install-win32 folder and edit the makeopenvpn file. Here is where you define the --enable-password-save option in the configure command. In order to add this new argument, go to the last one, add a \ in the end and write the --enable-password-save on a new line just above the fi.

You should probably also delete line 265 in the openvpn.nsi file writing “;!define SF_SELECTED 1” which caused me troubles since SF_SELECTED was already declared. To verify whether you need to delete this line or not, you may press right click and then “Compile NSIS Script” and try to fix any errors that may occur.

Time to fire up msys. Verify that you see the extracted folders by typing "ls" and then pressing the Enter key. Open the openvpn-2.1_rc13 folder by typing "cd openvpn-2.1_rc13" (pressing tab will autocomplete the names). Inside the folder, issue the "./domake-win" command which builds the whole thing up. If the whole process is successful then you’ll have your personal installation of openvpn in the install-win32 folder.

Some note about running openvpn on windows vista. First of all, you must install it by right clicking and then selecting "Run as administrator" and second and more important, you must right click on your openvpn-gui-1.0.3.exe file and click properties. From there navigate to Compatibility and enable the “Run this program as administrator” or it won't be able to add the routes.

Enjoy.