I guess you could sense that I wasn’t satisfied with my previous solution regarding OpenVPN GUI and user privileges. So I invested some more time to be able to cut down permissions again. I discovered a way that works without extending privileges or entering a password!

How does it work? Things are pretty simple – as simple that I already overlooked that possibility at my first try. The mechanism used to get things working is known to us linux guys as ‘cron’. Windows got it too – they just call it task scheduler which doesn’t even sound half as cool as ‘cron’.

As the task scheduler is able to execute tasks using a different username or group, it’s not a big deal to set things up to have OpenVPN GUI started as a network settings operator. As a trigger I used the login event and turned off the automatic termination… et voila.

If things don’t work as expected, adding a little delay of 1 minute at startup allows the desktop to load so the OpenVPN GUI is able to settle in the tray.