Configure/Setup OpenVPN in Linux(Ubuntu)

Consider securing your insecure connection between you and remote resources,protecting your privacy,bypassing reasonable restrictions,better connectivity or port forwarding ,using VPN is a certain way to do so.

OpenVPN makes it easy to setup and use a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to use SSL/TLS certificates for authentication and key exchange between the VPN server and clients.OpenVPN can be used in a routed or bridged VPN mode and can be configured to use either UDP or TCP.And it is only using that single port for all communication.VPN client implementations are available for almost anything including all Linux distributions,OS X,Windows,OpenWRT based WLAN routers.

I recently felt the need for a VPN while installing Spotify.I had to install it by adding Spotify repositories into my /etc/sources.list because the .deb or .rpm file was not available.Using proxies I could only browse the Spotify home page.I had to use proxy because I am using a network in which some resources are kept restricted.Doing this helped me get my hands on the repositories.

Updating my sources.list file,I hit update on my terminal.The repositories that I added were supposed to fetch and install Spotify but it didn’t.

It was then realized that I need OpenVPN to fetch the files from restricted resources using my terminal.

To configure OpenVPN you require the zip file VPNBook-OpenVPN_US.

You can download it from this link - VpnBook

Steps:

1)Extract the zip.On extracting you will find 4 text files already present in it.

2)Next you need to create 3 text files in the extracted folder naming   

them “ca.crt” , ”certificate.crt” , ”key.key”.

3)Now open any one of the 4 files which were present in the zip.I chose vpnbook-us-1-tcp443.ovpn.

4)You’ll see some predefined configurations.Here we are interested only in the certificates.

5)Copy the ca certificate between <ca>................</ca>.Paste it into your ca.crt file and save it.

6)Follow the same for other  certificate and paste it into certificate.cert.

7)Copy the key between <key>.........</key> and paste it into key.key.

8)Next you need to install VPN plugin.Install it by entering the following command

          sudo apt-get install network-manager-openvpn

9)Next click on your network icon on the status bar,under VPN connections choose Configure VPN.

10)A dialog should appear asking you the type of connection you want to setup.Choose OpenVpn.

11)If in case you do not see such option then execute following command.

          sudo apt-get install network-manager-openvpn network-manager-openvpn-gnome

12)After selecting OpenVPN,hit OK.It should bring you to Edit VPN dialog box.Provide VPN name according to your wish.

13)Now open the same text file from which you copied your certificates.Copy the IP address corresponding to remote and paste it into the gateway in the Edit VPN dialog box.

14)Under Authentication choose the type “Password with certificates(TLS)”.

15)The username and the password are mentioned on the same site  you downloaded the VPNBook zip.

16)Now for User Certificate browse and choose the file certificate.crt , for CA certificate choose ca.crt ,and for Private Key choose key.key.

(All these 3 files you have already created by pasting certificates inside them ).

17)Leave the Private Key Password textbox empty.

18)Click Advanced option at the bottom.Select Use custom gateway port and enter the port number which is present right next to remote ipaddress you copied previously.

I chose the file with tcp433.ovpn so it was 433 for me.

19)Also,tick Use LZO and TCP connection options.

20)Next,click on security tab,and choose Cipher to AES-128-CBC.

21)Hit OK and then hit save.

22)When you are done with this,click on the network icon,choose VPN Connections,and the name of your newly created VPN should appear there.Click on it to set that vpn.You should see a message displaying VPN Connection Successful.That’s it.

After doing this,and connecting my system to vpn,I hit update on my Linux once again and then tried to install Spotify client , and voila! It started installing Spotify client on my Ubuntu.