About

This is a turn-key solution to create your own VPN in the cloud. It's a vagrant-template that uses chef to set up OpenVPN server on a cloud-hoster and a small script to pull the VPN-servers configuration and set up the Tunnelblick-VPN app on the client.

Currently works with

• DigitalOcean
• Rackspace

Setup

• Install Vagrant
• execute vagrant plugin install vagrant-omnibus vagrant-digitalocean
• sign up for your favorite supported hoster
• set up environment-variables:

  • For Digitalocean:

    export DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN="<TODO>"
    

  • For Rackspace:

    export RACKSPACE_USERNAME="<TODO>"
    export RACKSPACE_API_KEY="<TODO>"
    

• install Tunnelblick (if you are on a Mac) or any other OpenVPN capable VPN client
• clone the repo

Usage

(use all commands below with the cloned repository folder as your working directory)

Setting up a VPN server

• vagrant up --provider=digital_ocean to start an instance at DigitalOcean (per default in the US region)
• vagrant up --provider=rackspace to start an instance at Rackspace (per default in the London region)

Setting up a VPN client

• if you are on a Mac and are using tunnelblick, just execute ./set_up_vpn_client.sh

• if you are on a different OS, have a look into the script to find out how to get the generated OpenVPN config from the server. (Basically, it's scp-ing a tar.gz that contains everything you need)

• [Optional] You can also specify a host to read the vpn-configuration from, as well as the name of the vpn e.g. ./set_up_vpn_client.sh root 10.0.0.1 my-vpn. This is useful if you are regenerating your host from a saved image and just want an updated vpn configuration

Destroying your VPN server

The beauty of having a cloud-hoster is that it's cheap to destroy your VPN server when you are not using it:

• vagrant destroy