Last week I started using a VPN, You can read in this lifehacker article on why you could use one.
I started using it for two reasons:
- Ciphered and tunneled communications
- Geolocated video
For me It’s more a matter of security and freedom too, the other reasons are secondary.
I use Cyberghost, but you can see in this extense article which one to choose if you’re interested.
I chose Cyberghost because they are in Europe (Romania), because they don’t keep any logs and I like what they stand for. They have some free proxies if you want to test the service first, but they will probably go much slower.
Note: You can just use the Network Manager in GNOME/KDE and others, use this tutorial if you want to configure it via the command line.
To get the VPN working on Arch, you install OpenVPN.
# pacman -S openvpn
We go to the cyberghost website, logged in, My Devices.
Then you go below and save the configuration, download the Cyberghost.opvn file.
Move the file Cyberghost.opvn to /etc/openvpn and rename it to vpn-de.conf (you can name it whatever you want, I have it this way to switch between countries, vpn-country-code).
We need two more files, we create an /etc/openvpn/user.txt and we add our Cyberghost credentials (user, password) in different lines, like this.
javi
myPassword
The second file, we get the script to update-resolv (DNS) every time we open/close the VPN connection, you can get it from this gist linked from the ArchWiki. We put it in /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf.sh and make it executable chmod +x /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf.sh.
We’ve got all the files, now let’s edit our /etc/openvpn/vpn-de.conf to update DNS with our update-resolv script and to get the user.txt credentials. We’ll need to do this changes in all the /etc/openvpn/vpn-<country>.conf per country cyberghost configurations (if we have more than one configuration).
We change the line
auth-user-pass
for
auth-user-pass /etc/openvpn/user.txt
and before the certificate tag <ca> we add the lines to update the DNS in this same file.
...
up /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf.sh
down /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf.sh
That’s it! We can now enjoy our vpn using the following command.
# systemctl start openvpn@vpn-de
where vpn-de is our /etc/openvpn/vpn-de.conf profile/configuration, if you change the name (for example /etc/openvpn/cyberghost.conf) your command will be…
# systemctl start openvpn@cyberghost
If this looks tedious you could just use the network manager in GNOME/KDE or others, but what’s the fun in that right? :-)
UPDATE 29th Apr 2017: There is a new updated article regarding best VPN services