ANNOUNCEMENT: OpenVPN Access Server beta available

As the founder of the OpenVPN project, I'm proud to announce the first 
beta release of our new product, the OpenVPN Access Server.

With this product, we've taken years of feedback from the OpenVPN 
community and condensed it into a lightweight but powerful management 
application that we believe will dramatically simplify the effort 
required to configure and manage OpenVPN, while still enabling its most 
powerful features.

It's been an interesting voyage for me, having started this project 7 
years ago.  At that time, "easy-to-use VPN" had a very different meaning 
that it does today.  "easy-to-use" meant that you could get it running 
without having to recompile your kernel :)

Over the years of developing and supporting OpenVPN, I've realized that 
getting VPNs to work right is hard -- sometimes even harder than writing 
the actual VPN code.

I think the complexity arises from the fact that VPN administration 
combines 3 different areas of expertise -- (1) Public Key Infrastructure 
(PKI) and certificate management, (2) IP Networking, including routing 
and firewall management, and (3) authentication models such as LDAP and 
RADIUS.

To me, there was always a dilemma of sorts in how to address this 
complexity.  Should OpenVPN stay true to the open source ideal of narrow 
focus and simplicity, where each tool should try to do a single job 
well, or should OpenVPN take the integrated approach and try to tackle 
all the issues that make VPNs complex, such as authentication, 
routing/firewall management, certificate management, etc?  The narrow