#openvpn

okay so picture this. im a twenty something neet looking for a free vpn to use on your computer that doesn't fuck me over data wise. im browsing firefox extensions getting increasingly bogged down with existential despair until i find a small little extension called "openvpn server finder." i open it up. apparently it's maintained by a university guy and finds servers to connect to. neat! this openvpn sounds like a good service! probably some open source software community maintained vpn project! exactly what i was looking for.

so i look up openvpn to see if you can download it. for some reason there's no download page on their website, even though you CAN download an access server. so if you want you can BE that server in switzerland people connect to. you get two free and apparently the rest are paid? what a weird business practice for a vpn service!

some of you might already know where this is headed.

i do some further digging. apparently this vpn service comes pre installed on my computer and can be run from the command prompt! cool! isn't it great how linux people always get into community projects like this one? man if more people knew about this super secret free vpn service it could really change things :) now if only i could figure out how to download it onto other computers... there doesn't seem to be a download page anywhere! how did this computer get it in the first place?

so anyway remember that server finder extension? apparently you download a configuration file from that, plug it into this vpn service, and it'll use the config file to connect to a specified server. so that way you have complete control over where in the world you connect to! WOW THESE OPENVPN GUYS ARE REALLY COOKING HUH

(through gritted teeth) WHAT A GREAT VPN SERVICE. YEP THAT'S RIGHT A VPNNNNNNNN SERVICE. JUST LIKE NORDVPN BUT BETTER IN EVERY WAY.

so doing it from the command prompt is... tricky. like any linux endeavor there is a lot of jank. it takes a lot of looking things up, writing things down, and fiddling around with the openvpn command. days of work. but hey, that's the price of free and secure, right? even when i'm completely stumped as to how these nerds are making it all work i keep at it, because im an incorrigible cheapskate and i'd rather die by firing squad than pay for something if i can help it.

finally. FINALLY. i figure it out. the magic words.

sudo openvpn --config INSERT/FILEPATH/HERE --data-ciphers AES-128-CBC

idk why a vpn service would have you specify the encryption key. but i guess i shouldnt expect anything less from a non profit vpn service that's no doubt run by a bunch of linux nerds, right? :) and i heard of linux applications needing firefox extensions to work. surely that doesn't mean anything.

only. today i found some posts on reddit talking about how services like nord USE openvpn. this is WEIRD to me. why would a service use another service?

yall. it's because openvpn isn't a service. it's a protocol. it comes installed on most computers by DEFAULT so you can USE vpn services. it's a coding library you and those applications call upon, essentially. that's why you specify connection ports. that's why you specify encryption keys. THAT'S WHY I COULDNT UNINSTALL IT LIKE ANY OTHER PROGRAM WITHOUT THE SYSTEM WARNING ME IT WOULD BREAK. THAT'S WHY THE FUCKING WEBSITE DIDN'T HAVE YOU PAY FOR IT BEING INSTALLED BECAUSE IT'S ON LITERALLY EVERY FUCKING COMPUTER BY DEFAULT.

this entire time i was configuring my pc to connect to vpns MYSELF. MULTIPLE TIMES. WHICH IS END STAGE NERD BULLSHIT THAT BARELY ANYONE DOES. WHILE BEING DUMB ENOUGH TO BELIEVE THIS WAS SOME SUPER SECRET FREE VPN SERVICE THE ENTIRE TIME I WAS DOING SO.

AND I JUST THOUGHT "man i wonder why more people arent doing this, this is a great vpn service :)" AS THOUGH KNOWLEDGE OF ENCRYPTION KEYS AND TUN/TAP PORTS ARE JUST. NORMAL THINGS TO KNOW? IN ORDER TO USE A VPN SERVICE?

LIKE ON ONE HAND WOW COOL I'VE BEEN DOING VPN OFF MY OWN PC WITHOUT A SERVICE OR TRAINING WHEELS THIS ENTIRE TIME. AWESOME.

BUT ON THE OTHER HOW THE FUCK DID I DO THIS WHILE BARELY EVEN UNDERSTANDING WHAT I WAS DOING IN THE FIRST PLACE? LIKE DAMN I FIGURED OUT THE CORE ASPECTS OF HOW VPNS WORK AND LEARNED TO APPLY THEM ON MY COMPUTER AND YET STILL COULDNT PUT TWO AND TWO TOGETHER AS TO WHAT OPENVPN EVEN WAS???

i'm trying to achieve these goals:

redundant routing plane (so a VPS going down doesn't take down the whole network)

vanilla clients for mobile devices (i'm not a software dev)

clients include laptops, physical servers, phones, and containers/VMs behind a variety of NAT and firewall configurations out of my control

routers are VPSes, globally distributed

self-hosted

minimal configuration effort for new clients

前一篇「在 AWS 上面的 OpenVPN Server 效能」最後的問題就是 EC2 instance 本身的網路效能，畢竟是公司要用的，還是實際測一下數字，之後有人接手的時候也比較清楚是怎麼選這個大小的… 這邊拿的是 AWS 的 ap-southeast-1 (Singapore) 的 EC2 測試，直接在同一個 subnet 裡面開兩台一樣的機器跑 iperf 測試。 機器開機後會先跑這串指令 (除了安裝 iperf 的指令，其他的是出自我自己 wiki 上的 Ubuntu 這頁)，然後再重開機： sudo fallocate -l 512M /swapfile; sudo chmod 600 /swapfile; sudo mkswap /swapfile; sudo swapon /swapfile; echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' |…

I am a new Debian Linux 11 server user. How do I set up an OpenVPN Server on Debian Linux version 11 server to shield my browsing activity from bad guys on public Wi-Fi, and more?

AirVPN which uses OpenVPN is not easy to use on Windows.

It’s highly recommended by reddit and most torrenting forums and they have very friendly forums but if you’re not on linux, android, server software or mac they’re kinda like “Windows, eh, what you gonna do?” or “here’s a huge bunch of code you need to compile and run”.

Basically you can run it two ways

1- All the time. In which case a bunch of websites will log you out, send you emails asking why you’re changing locations and to complete captchas and time sensitive codes. If you have your own website it’ll need you to whitelist your ip each login.

2- When you plan to use torrents or streaming, during which time you have to avoid using your main websites.

Either way, windows gets very confused between the firewall and internet connections and starts randomly choosing one as it’s main go to and you have to use task manager to close windows or openvpn processes you did not ask to run.

The problem is that us Windows users just want to stick a proxy in our browser or torrent program (which used to use SOCKS but that’s leaky) and OpenVPN wants to create a whole internet tunnel which means tinkering with a whole load of seperate and tricksy windows settings.

amzn_assoc_ad_type = "banner"; amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon"; amzn_assoc_region = "US"; amzn_assoc_placement = "assoc_banner_placement_default"; amzn_assoc_campaigns = "echo"; amzn_assoc_banner_type = "category"; amzn_assoc_isresponsive = "true"; amzn_assoc_banner_id = "1ZZ5TM5SVRD2GHZ0KFG2"; amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "kraljevicn1-20"; amzn_assoc_linkid = "78d0ce00bb3ae0fc191ee006bde05194";

Every few months the "What VPN should i use?" or "Can you recommend any good VPN providers?" question surfaces. I'm sick and tired of these questions, the only good an trustworthy VPN is one you setup and maintain by yourself for yourself.

Signing up to a VPN service is often touted as a "good privacy and or security measure" Thats not always true and if I was in the business of catching all kinds of devious people the first thing I would do is setup a VPN for them to sign up to and then start monitoring all of their traffic.

Coming back to running a VPN. Hardware is expensive and logistics become exponentially complicated when trying to run your own 1 man VPN operation. However with Cloud it becomes much more feasible to setup a global VPN by yourself effectively. So in this post I'll show you how to start setting up your own VPN on the cloud.

Setup Instructions

I set up this VPN server on AWS in order to follow these steps you need to:

Sign up to Amazon Web services

Provision an EC2 instance (any linux distribution is fine but for this tutorial I used Amazon Linux)

Once you have done the above log into your newly provisioned server and run the following commands to setup OpenVPN:

$ sudo yum update -y $ sudo yum install -y openvpn $ sudo modprobe iptable_nat $ echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward 1 $ sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.4.0.1/2 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE $ cd /etc/openvpn $ sudo openvpn --genkey --secret vpn.key $ sudo service openvpn start Starting openvpn: [ OK ]

Once your done make sure you copy the VPN key (you will need this to access your VPN) you can copy it off the server using sftp or just coping the output of the cat command (warning the output below has been fudged.

$ sudo cat ovpn.key # # 2048 bit OpenVPN static key # -----BEGIN OpenVPN Static key V1----- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb cccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc 1111111111111111111111111111111 aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb cccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc 1111111111111111111111111111111 aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb cccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc 1111111111111111111111111111111 aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb cccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc 1111111111111111111111111111111 -----END OpenVPN Static key V1-----

Connecting to your VPN

You will need to create a configuration file for your VPN here. You will also need your VPN key here to feed into your configuration file.

The following configuration file is an example of a windows openVPN configuration file:

proto tcp-client remote [your.server.ip.here] port 1194 dev tun secret "C:\\path\\to\\your\\vpn\\key\\vpn.key" OR "\\path\\to\\your\\vpn\\key\\vpn.key" redirect-gateway def1 ifconfig 10.4.0.2 10.4.0.1

After you have created the config file you can setup one of the following openVPN clients for your operating system to connect to your VPN:

OpenVPN Windows

TunnelBlick (Mac OSX)

OpenVPN Linux

Conclusion

As always I hope you found this tutorial useful. Please let me know if you would like to see more cloud or privacy / VPN focused tutorials in the near future.