Clarify --- > data channel vs control channel

[iwih2gk 93]

Because I am on Debian buster I can't fully access chacha20 encryption without upgrading OpenVpn from SID.  I don't want to do that since Bullseye is due out next month and then OpenVPN will be high enough to see chacha20 with Eddie on my desktops.  While I am waiting I was looking through the stats on my Eddie client.  I noticed that the VPN control channel is already using chacha20 but of course the VPN data channel is still on AES.

Can someone shed a little light here on exactly what those two channels do independently of each other?  Just trying learn something and this forum is the place to do it.

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

Shouldn't be a problem upgrading only openvpn from sid. Use the -t sid option. Unless it wants to upgrade glibc or something. As an alternative, use the official OpenVPN APT repo:
https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/OpenvpnSoftwareRepos#DebianUbuntu:UsingOpenVPNaptrepositories

On the difference of Control and Data Channel maybe the channel structure descriptions can shed a liitle light on this:
https://build.openvpn.net/doxygen/network_protocol.html
.

[iwih2gk 93]

When I noticed that Debian moved Bullseye to "Full Freeze" I decided its close enough to stable for me.  I upgraded 3 systems to Bullseye and so far its running the best of any Debian I've ever run.  Been with Debian for a long time so that is a statement with merit for them on this version.  Still have my critical priority OS's running Buster while I "test drive" Bullseye on non-critical work for about another week.  By the way Eddie is running fine on Bullseye and with full NFT on my end.  Of course this resolved the chacha20 issue and now both channels are using it well!

Thank you for the link on the channel differences question.  That read helped me alot.