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Be your own VPN provider with OpenBSD

networkfilter.blogspot.com

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Re: Be your own VPN provider with OpenBSD

#2

Post by cfallin »

If anyone's ever looking for an even quicker hack, ssh has built-in the ability to act as a SOCKS5 proxy, tunneling your traffic over ssh to whatever remote machine you might have access to:

$ ssh -D 1080 myserver.myhost.net

Then configure Chrome or Firefox or whatever to use a SOCKS5 proxy on localhost, port 1080. (N.B. that this does not tunnel DNS lookups by default.)

The OpenVPN-based route is the way to go for something used regularly, but the above is sometimes super-convenient!

Re: Be your own VPN provider with OpenBSD

#3

Post by joshbaptiste »

cfallin wrote: post #2

If anyone's ever looking for an even quicker hack, ssh has built-in the ability to act as a SOCKS5 proxy, tunneling your traffic over ssh to whatever remote machine you might have access to: $ ssh -D 1080 myserver.myhost.net Then configure Chrome or Firefox or whatever to use a SOCKS5 proxy on localhost, port 1080. (N.B. that this does not tunnel DNS lookups by default.) The OpenVPN-based route is the way to go for s…

Yep.. with both browsers I install Foxy-proxy which makes switching proxies super easy.

Re: Be your own VPN provider with OpenBSD

#4

Post by christop »

cfallin wrote: post #2

If anyone's ever looking for an even quicker hack, ssh has built-in the ability to act as a SOCKS5 proxy, tunneling your traffic over ssh to whatever remote machine you might have access to: $ ssh -D 1080 myserver.myhost.net Then configure Chrome or Firefox or whatever to use a SOCKS5 proxy on localhost, port 1080. (N.B. that this does not tunnel DNS lookups by default.) The OpenVPN-based route is the way to go for s…

Even quicker still is to use sshuttle; it automatically transparently tunnels all of your traffic through an SSH connection, without having to change any proxy settings.

Very useful.

Re: Be your own VPN provider with OpenBSD

#5

Post by bitserf »

cfallin wrote: post #2

If anyone's ever looking for an even quicker hack, ssh has built-in the ability to act as a SOCKS5 proxy, tunneling your traffic over ssh to whatever remote machine you might have access to: $ ssh -D 1080 myserver.myhost.net Then configure Chrome or Firefox or whatever to use a SOCKS5 proxy on localhost, port 1080. (N.B. that this does not tunnel DNS lookups by default.) The OpenVPN-based route is the way to go for s…

You can get the OpenVPN route quite seamless from a client perspective (server is still a pain in the ass to set up).

You can bundle all the configuration for a particular client into a .ovpn file - this includes the client and CA certificates.

I use this on iPhones and iPads, with the OpenVPN iOS app - works great for a family of iOS devices that need access to some geo-locked services.

Re: Be your own VPN provider with OpenBSD

#9

Post by regecks »

gatehouse wrote: post #8

I've been considering running all my mobile data through a VPN for better security, and saving all of it so I can analyze anything after the fact. Anyone doing anything like this?

Keeping a VPN connection alive doesn't do the battery any favors, and bringing up a VPN connection isn't that fast to do it on-demand.

Re: Be your own VPN provider with OpenBSD

#10

Post by guelo »

The disadvantage of this over a shared VPN that doesn't keep logs is that there's now a unique IP address that can be tied back to you. A cool feature for a VPS would be to have a shared IP address between a bunch of customers.
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