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Dan Goodin has written an interesting article for theregister.co.uk about the benefits of using a personal VPN for your wireless internet traffic.

There are some downsides to running a VPN server at home. One of these is that all of your data must travel via your home PC/server and most peoples broadband connections will limit the speed that this will work at. The maximum speed of your VPN connection will be limited by the upload speed of your home broadband - which is normally quite slow. Also, dynamic IP addresses, port forwarding and NAT on your broadband router and having to leave your home PC powered on all the time could be a pain.

Another alternative could be to run OpenVPN on your own server (or vps) at a data center or, a cheaper alternative, to buy access to an OpenVPN server that has already been setup and configured.

I’ve been playing with OpenVPN for the past couple of weeks and I’m pretty impressed. OpenVPN allows you to create a private network between 2 computers. These could be 2 servers or a client and a server. A few of the reasons for wanting to do this are -

• bypassing your ISPs traffic shaping
• making your traffic appear to originate from a different country
• encrypting your laptop traffic over an insecure link - such as a coffee shop wifi connection
• anonymous web surfing
• bypassing a countries web access controls

Setup and configuration of the server component can be fairly complicated depending how you want to manage the certificates and networking on there. It’s possible to install it on Linux or Windows although I’ve only tested it on Linux. Running the server on Linux you also need to configure iptables to translate your private ‘vpn’ ip address to an external ip address on the vpn server.

Continue reading ‘Running OpenVPN’ »