Setting Up OpenVPN & PIA as a client

Proven on:

13 (trixie)

As always...
Start with:	sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade

While Private Internet Access offers an "app" to manage usage, that's not a particularly useful way to do things in a whole lot of cases.

Particularly if you want to use it on a server or VM or LXC running mostly headless...

NOTE: If you are working on an LXC, see this.

install openvpn & the PIA files

• sudo apt install openvpn unzip whois
• sudo mkdir /etc/openvpn/PIA
• cd /etc/openvpn/PIA
• sudo wget https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/openvpn/openvpn.zip
• sudo unzip openvpn.zip

Configure openvpn

• cd /etc/openvpn
  • Copy the exit point you like from inside PIA here & change the extension to .conf
    • sudo cp PIA/ukraine.ovpn ./ukraine.conf # an example...
  • Edit the .conf file and remove the <crl-verify> block. (For some reason openvpn thinks PIAs CRL blocks are ALWAYS malformed...)
  • Add /etc/openvpn/auth.txt to the line: auth-user-pass
    • auth-user-pass /etc/openvpn/auth.txt # like this...

(Working on an alternate method that uses a single file to give access to all of the exit points.)

• sudo vi auth.txt
  • copy your PIA username & password into this file (on 2 lines...)

Bob
SecretSquirrel!

• sudo vi /etc/default/openvpn
  • uncomment the #AUTOSTART="all" line
• sudo service openvpn start

From this point on, accessing the internet from this machine (or VM or LXC) will go through your chosen PIA exit point.

It may take a moment or two to initialise fully. And, startup may seem a little slower. But patience is a virtue...

Testing

• wget http://ipinfo.io/ip -qO -

Should give you an IP address that does NOT match your actual external IP

• whois `wget http://ipinfo.io/ip -qO -`

Will give you a wall-o-text. In that wall-o-text, you'll find the country code of where ipinfo.io thinks you are. (This, of course, should match your chosen exit point...)

Tips

NOTE: When using a VPN, you may need to use IP addresses to refer to other machines on your LAN. This depends entirely on your LAN configuration, but it's a simple quick fix if you run into issues reaching local resources.

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Further testing is required, but in previous versions of this, I've found that OpenVPN did not reconnect after a network outage. Tho that was with OpenVPN running from a script in /etc/inet.d, so may no longer be an issue...

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I've discovered that service openvpn restart seems to actually act exactly the same as service openvpn stop. This seems wrong...

In order to RESTART openvpn, it is a 2 step process.

• service openvpn stop
• service openvpn start

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Monitoring