Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community - View Single Post - Personal VPN setup, cost and how to set up?

gottabekd · 07-10-2017, 01:06 PM

I'm not really sure exactly what you are after, but I have some general comments which may be useful.

"VPN" can be used for a few different purposes. Companies with multiple offices around the world and remote employees might use a VPN to allow everyone to connect to their company network in a secure way. Or a "personal VPN" might just mean a single user routing their Internet traffic through a third party, giving some anonymity and potentially increasing the security of their traffic.

So assuming you are looking more for a personal VPN, and this may be obvious, but an analogy will help. A personal VPN is essentially a tunnel out to the Internet. A tunnel needs a start and an endpoint. The start will be your personal computer or laptop. The end will be some location out there on the Internet, and since someone is providing this service to you, you need to pay for it.

So an analogy would be say you live in a gated community where everything is nice and secure, but just outside the gate is some pretty rough areas. To drive across town you want to avoid driving through these rough areas. So instead of taking the surface streets, you build a tunnel under the city. Naturally, you will need to buy or rent some real estate for the exit of the tunnel. So you build the exit right into downtown, and now your commute to work avoids the sketchy areas.

Relating back to networking, a subscription to a personal VPN service is you paying for access to the tunnel endpoint. And the "security" of the VPN only really helps you bypass some sketchy networks like public wifi. Once your Internet traffic exits your VPN endpoint, it is no longer any more secure.

For VPN implementations, it gets pretty technical. I'm still not exactly sure what you are after, and maybe my analogy was already clear. But the key point is that you need that endpoint (tunnel exit) somewhere out there on the Internet. You can either pay a company for access to a VPN endpoint, or buy/rent a server hosted somewhere and set up a VPN there yourself.

I use https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ as a personal VPN. It is fairly inexpensive, and they have good instructions and software that is suitable for any computer user to install and use. They also have 20+ endpoints around the world.

If you want to set this up yourself, there is one thing to consider. You can configure the VPN on your router (some high power routers will support OpenVPN, which Private Internet Access uses under the hood). This way, all your traffic from all your devices (that are connected to the Wifi on your router) will be using your VPN, without any further setup on your devices. Alternatively, you can install the PIA (Private Internet Access) software on every device you wish to use the VPN with. This is definitely a lot simpler than trying to configure a VPN at the router level.

Finally, you said you aren't interested in purchasing a subscription to a VPN. I'm saying you will have to if you want to use the VPN on the Internet. If you really just want to learn, then I suggest renting a server somewhere (such as digitalocean.com where a small server instance can be $5/month). This will give you a blank Linux system which you can read some docs on OpenVPN and have a go at setting it up, if that sounds appealing. I will caution that configuring networking remotely can be a pain because if you screw something up, you get locked out of the machine. Thankfully Digital Ocean provides console access via the browser that bypasses any of the networking setup.

07-10-2017, 01:06 PM	#2
gottabekd Powerplay Quarterback Join Date: Mar 2006 Exp:	I'm not really sure exactly what you are after, but I have some general comments which may be useful. "VPN" can be used for a few different purposes. Companies with multiple offices around the world and remote employees might use a VPN to allow everyone to connect to their company network in a secure way. Or a "personal VPN" might just mean a single user routing their Internet traffic through a third party, giving some anonymity and potentially increasing the security of their traffic. So assuming you are looking more for a personal VPN, and this may be obvious, but an analogy will help. A personal VPN is essentially a tunnel out to the Internet. A tunnel needs a start and an endpoint. The start will be your personal computer or laptop. The end will be some location out there on the Internet, and since someone is providing this service to you, you need to pay for it. So an analogy would be say you live in a gated community where everything is nice and secure, but just outside the gate is some pretty rough areas. To drive across town you want to avoid driving through these rough areas. So instead of taking the surface streets, you build a tunnel under the city. Naturally, you will need to buy or rent some real estate for the exit of the tunnel. So you build the exit right into downtown, and now your commute to work avoids the sketchy areas. Relating back to networking, a subscription to a personal VPN service is you paying for access to the tunnel endpoint. And the "security" of the VPN only really helps you bypass some sketchy networks like public wifi. Once your Internet traffic exits your VPN endpoint, it is no longer any more secure. For VPN implementations, it gets pretty technical. I'm still not exactly sure what you are after, and maybe my analogy was already clear. But the key point is that you need that endpoint (tunnel exit) somewhere out there on the Internet. You can either pay a company for access to a VPN endpoint, or buy/rent a server hosted somewhere and set up a VPN there yourself. I use https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ as a personal VPN. It is fairly inexpensive, and they have good instructions and software that is suitable for any computer user to install and use. They also have 20+ endpoints around the world. If you want to set this up yourself, there is one thing to consider. You can configure the VPN on your router (some high power routers will support OpenVPN, which Private Internet Access uses under the hood). This way, all your traffic from all your devices (that are connected to the Wifi on your router) will be using your VPN, without any further setup on your devices. Alternatively, you can install the PIA (Private Internet Access) software on every device you wish to use the VPN with. This is definitely a lot simpler than trying to configure a VPN at the router level. Finally, you said you aren't interested in purchasing a subscription to a VPN. I'm saying you will have to if you want to use the VPN on the Internet. If you really just want to learn, then I suggest renting a server somewhere (such as digitalocean.com where a small server instance can be $5/month). This will give you a blank Linux system which you can read some docs on OpenVPN and have a go at setting it up, if that sounds appealing. I will caution that configuring networking remotely can be a pain because if you screw something up, you get locked out of the machine. Thankfully Digital Ocean provides console access via the browser that bypasses any of the networking setup.