# openvpn question

## evoweiss

Hi all,

I'm interested in better protecting my privacy (age has a way of doing that to me). Also, I am planning on setting up things so that I can better access resources at work, etc. I was wondering whether it would be possible for me to set up a gentoo box as an openvnc server and then using that box to connect to the internet. Would that hide my traffic, IP address, etc.? Any links to relevant tutorials would be helpful, thanks.

Best,

Alex

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## cdstealer

Hi,

If I'm understanding you correctly... you want to connect to your box at home to bypass your company's security / remain anonymous when browsing the internet on the company network?  If that's the case, then do the company block/filter outgoing traffic?  If they do then it's unlikely that anything you do will help.  Depending on exactly what you want to do, I'm not sure that openvpn will be an ideal solution.  If it's just web browsing, then squid would be a better solution, which also supports encrypted authentication so the only visibility your NOC would have is the protocol, source & destination and not the content of the data  :Smile: 

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## evoweiss

 *cdstealer wrote:*   

> Hi,
> 
> If I'm understanding you correctly... you want to connect to your box at home to bypass your company's security / remain anonymous when browsing the internet on the company network?  If that's the case, then do the company block/filter outgoing traffic?  If they do then it's unlikely that anything you do will help.  Depending on exactly what you want to do, I'm not sure that openvpn will be an ideal solution.  If it's just web browsing, then squid would be a better solution, which also supports encrypted authentication so the only visibility your NOC would have is the protocol, source & destination and not the content of the data 

 

Not exactly. I want to connect to a VPN I have set up at home to obscure my IP address.

Best,

Alex

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## MK27

 *cdstealer wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Not exactly. I want to connect to a VPN I have set up at home to obscure my IP address.
> 
> 

 

I've only ever used openVPN as a client, but I think you *might* be a little confused about its purpose.  The point of a Virtual Private Network is to provide secure access to a set of remote resources, not to provide proxy access to the world at large (altho it *might* also be capable of that).

http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/howto.html

If all you want to do is access the web from work without exposing that IP, by using the IP of your computer at home, I would think there is a simpler way to do it (eg, squid as previously suggested):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_%28software%29

http://www.squid-cache.org/

There are also apparently lots of anonymous open proxy services around which might save you all the effort.  Certainly, routing traffic thru your box at home is going to seriously slow things down.  Keep in mind that most providers have much much lower upload than download limits on speed and volume, and you will be uploading everything.

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## AngelKnight

 *evoweiss wrote:*   

> I'm interested in better protecting my privacy (age has a way of doing that to me). Also, I am planning on setting up things so that I can better access resources at work, etc. I was wondering whether it would be possible for me to set up a gentoo box as an openvnc server and then using that box to connect to the internet. Would that hide my traffic, IP address, etc.? Any links to relevant tutorials would be helpful, thanks.

 

Read Tor Overview: Staying Anonymous to see why obscuring your IP may be the least of your problems in this regard.

If you wish to continue anyway, then yes, it is possible to leverage OpenVPN in order to default all your outbound traffic from another node so that it appears to be coming from the other end of the OpenVPN tunnel.  The basic problem to be mindful of is that on the "client" station, you'll need a nexthop for your OpenVPN peer on the other end to use the nexthop that's set for your default gateway, then change your default gateway on the client station in some fashion depending on how you've architected the OpenVPN tunnel.

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