Hacker News Reader

Comment by molecule | Hacker News Reader

subscribing to a VPN provider is typically easier, cheaper and provides more options than rolling your own on EC2

http://netforbeginners.about.com/od/readerpicks/tp/The-Best-...

Definitely true that cheaper is definitely possible, but a DigitalOcean droplet or an EC2 micro can be pretty cheap and you don't have to worry about the other VPN clients as much.

It is hell though - recently setup this on a droplet, but getting all the settings right and diagnosed on Ubuntu and some Ubuntu and Android clients was complicated. It never seems to work the first time...

L2TP/IPsec is hell. OpenVPN is not more difficult to set up than a web server. Of course, you need L2TP if you want to use the built-in clients on Android, IPhone, Windows...

Yeah, mobile support was a bit tricky to set up for us as well, but we managed it with just OpenVPN. The OpenVPN app for iPhone at least was able to be configured without too much headache, although it only supports a subset of the OpenVPN options. It should be compatible with the config in the article.

For Android, there's an OpenVPN app too - it uses the very handy and neat Android VPN API and besides needing certificates in the right format (not the text versions), it works well.

True, that was my first try, and it failed miserably.

Back in the 2.3 days, Android had OpenVPN support (or maybe it was just a CyanogenMod feature). I wish that would come back.

It was (and still is, IIRC) a CM feature.

I install something called OpenVPN-AS on a DigitalOcean droplet and it works like a charm...the first time out. Here are step-by-step instructions: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-insta....

Or you can just dynamically launch an EC2 instance just when you need a VPN : )

Can you do that securely without the VPN? b^)

with something like puppet, yeah

If you don't trust a public wifi hotspot with your cleartext traffic because of passive snooping, why would you trust a VPN provider with your cleartext traffic?

A lot of these torrent-anonymously consumer VPN services look pretty dodgy.

Use a non-dodgy VPN service, such as https://www.privatetunnel.com/ (run by the OpenVPN people) or https://privacy.cryptoseal.com/ (run by HN's rdl). You may be trusting them with your cleartext traffic, but that's really no different than trusting e.g. Comcast with your cleartext traffic when you're at home.

How does it provide more options?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com