Mikrotik RoutesOS has limited OpenVPN support: only TCP connections, no UDP, and no LZO compression.

I had to configure Linux OpenVPN(ver. 2.3) server and Mikrotik client. Seems easy. Connection was establishing normally, client got authentificated, and then error Bad LZO decompression header byte: 69 arised. Packets were not transmitted over the connection and finally it was killed on ping-restart timeout.

I tried not mentioning comp-lzo at all, setting it to no , to auto and pushing it to the client: push "comp-lzo no" . But the error was still there.

Finally I figured out, that there is one more LZO-related option, comp-noadapt , and it does the trick. I got stable working connection.

This option is supposed to make compression adaptive, allowing not to compress already compressed data, like transfer of large compressed file. I suppose, this adaptive algorithm somehow breaks comp-lzo no option, at least for several first packets.

Hope this article will save you some time, that I had to lose on debugging this annoying error.