Introduction
OpenVPN Access Server runs on Linux platforms. You can use an SSH client to connect to your server when connecting from a Windows PC. This document provides example steps for connecting with the PuTTY SSH client, which you can use to connect to Access Server running on an AWS EC2, DigitalOcean droplet, Azure servers, GCP instances, and more.
Before you begin, ensure you have a server with Access Server installed. Refer to our quick start guide.
PuTTY and PuTTYgen download
- Download the PuTTY installation package to install both PuTTY and PuTTYgen: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html. You can also get PuTTY from the Microsoft Store, published by Simon Tatham.
- Follow the program's installation steps.
Generate a key
- Launch the PuTTYgen app.
- Click Conversions > Import Key.
- Select the key file you used to generate your server. (If you don’t have a key file, refer to the quick start guides to install a server with Access Server first.)
- Enter the passphrase for your key if needed.
- PuTTYgen loads your key file; click Save private key.
- Name your key, save it to a file location, and close PuTTYgen.
Configure SSH session
- Launch the PuTTY tool.
- Enter the static IP address of your server in the Host Name (or IP address) field.
- In the left-hand navigation, navigate to SSH > Auth > Credentials.
- Click Browse next to Private key file for authentication and select the private key you generated with PuTTYgen.
- Click Session, enter a name for this SSH session in the Saved Sessions text field, and click Save. (This saves your configuration so you can load it quickly next time.)
- Click Open to launch the SSH session.
Connect SSH session
- After clicking Open, PuTTY presents a message that it hasn’t seen this server before. It’s safe to click Accept.
- When prompted, sign in as your root user. For many of our cloud marketplace instances, use ‘openvpnas’.
- Upon successful key validation, you connect to the server, and the command line interface displays.