You don’t need to worry about fellow patrons at the coffee shop listening in on your network traffic because the traffic between you and your VPN is highly encrypted. Running your own VPN means that no matter where you get an internet connection from, you are effectively “at home”. You can add these same abilities to your home network so that you can get to your stuff from work, or a hotel, or anywhere else with internet access. Developers sometimes use them to simulate traffic coming into their network from outside for testing. You may have used one in order to securely access resources on the network at your office when you’re on the road. VPNs let you route internet traffic through a secure, encrypted channel, back to a network that you trust and/or control. OpenVPN is an open-source, cross-platform, virtual private networking (VPN) application. In this article, we’ll set up the Raspberry Pi to act as an OpenVPN server, allowing you to access your home network from anywhere. Now that the whole house is humming along, sharing files, downloading things, and backing everyone up, you might be wondering if there’s anything left that the Raspberry can do for you.

Just fill in the variables that are present, and leave CN commented out. The export variables at the bottom of vars have moved around a little, there’s now only one copy of your email address, and CN is commented out at the very bottom by default. It will end up in a different place as well, so the command to copy the scripts is now “sudo cp -r /usr/share/easy-rsa /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa” Just add “easy-rsa” to the list of things to install early on. Updates: EasyRSA is no longer installed as part of openvpn, but you can install it through apt-get just like anything else.

If you have a Pluralsight subscription, please consider watching it. Self-promotion: I’ve recorded this series as a screencast for Pluralsight: This article is kept for historical reference, but should be considered out of date. Please refer to the new index for updated articles and ordering. A new version of this series has been published.

Shiny server raspberry pi