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Ask Soylent: How Best to Set Up a VPN?

posted by mrcoolbp on Monday April 14 2014, @05:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-your-VPN-are-belong-to-us dept.

Gaaark writes:

Hello fellow Soylentils. Colour me a nice Soylent Green Canadian who up until recently has only worried somewhat about security. I use linux (mostly Ubuntu) and in the past I have had time to work at config files and do google searches to solve my problems. Today i have far less time to do these things. My question is: can anyone (practically) hand me a good, easy, linux-friendly, and hopefully cheap VPN solution? Extra kudos to those with free options.

Canada seems to be heading in the direction of the United States and I am beginning to worry that my internet is being taken from me. Can anyone come up with a solution to keep my internetting private and my downloads from being pried into? (I've heard VPN is the way to go, but searching for solutions leaves me wondering if I'm getting scammed in the process.)

Thanks in advance for the help.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday April 14 2014, @07:51PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Monday April 14 2014, @07:51PM (#31504) Journal

    For the instance where a person wants to use VPN to access his or her own networks, pfSense is a good option for firewall software (assuming like most geeks, you have a spare computer to set it up on): https://www.pfsense.org/ [pfsense.org] For example, set it up as the firewall for your home or office network, and you can VPN into that network using a VPN client from a coffee shop.

    For accessing the world however, the person asking this question should be aware that just getting a vpn account on some remote system is pretty easily traceable. It is obvious where you are connecting to, and where that system is then connecting to, and significantly, your credit card (and real name) gets associated with that intermediate address on a regular periodic basis, thus revealing exactly who you are and the fact you are routing everything through a VPN. You are probably more obvious too, with an encrypted stream to only one or a set range of IP addresses -- it's pretty clear what's going on making you an interesting person to investigate.

    A VPN is a great thing for the first paragraph option (relatively secure access to your own networks), but I would think a very risky proposition for the second (anonymizing your browsing).

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