vpn: Roll your own Virtual Private Network (Get off the Clog Bus)

I have no idea if the VPN's are overloaded I don't use them and if  I need one I just 'roll my own' -  I did some cursory looking and I guess clogged up VPNS are happening now commonly.  There are REAL good reasons to roll-your-own VPN.  

• It is YOUR vpn and works at the speed of your VPS. You do not have to share it.
• Knowing how to roll your own is powerful.

1. Rent yourself a VPS I really like cloudfanatic.net

A quick temporary VPS is created by opening a Linux terminal and simply typing:

ssh -D 8000 root@<yourip>

Here is the fun part Firefox has an option called 'Containers' which when installed and with it you can:

• Have one tab using your regular internet.
• Have a second tab using your home-rolled proxy.

Adding containers to firefox  - first add:

Once you have it added then add:

When you add a tab it will give you the option of managing tabs:

Setting up your proxy.  In this instance for some unknown reason Firefox refused to show the options - and the results may vary depending on your version.  For a standard proxy:

We setup our proxy as:

• Is it secure? Yes - because it is tunnelling through the SSH and required a login it is very secure.
• Is it fast? Yes - it works respectfully fast.

Speed Tests: To see how well it worked we took an already overworked dual core $5/month VPS and then had it stream 4K of times square.

• 1440p played with no hiccups.
• 2140p (4K) did hiccup.  

If 4K is that important then consider renting yourself a faster VPS for it.

Some alternate options:

• Have password-less ssh setup this way you can automatically send the proxy to background and have it also start at startup.

ssh-keygen
ssh-copy-id root@<ip>

Once that is done then test that you can access the VPS without a password.

Then to make it very persistent add 'nohup' which means no hangup and also add an & which tells linux it to kick it to a background.  Note you MUST do the two commands above because it cannot both prompt for a password and automatically kick the proxy to the background.

nohup ssh -N -D 8000 root@<ip> -p <port> & 

From Windows? It can be done inside Putty by command line option possibl?!! But Windows is crap. Switch.