One day I was doing some testing and I wanted to be sure it wasn’t my DNS/Routes that were causing the response time issues. A co-worker suggested using an EC2 instance as a VPN server. I thought that would be perfect!
I’m going to assume that you have the knowledge of starting up an Ubuntu EC2 instance.
First up is installing OpenVPN and enabling ip forwarding:
sudo apt-get install -y openvpn sudo modprobe iptable_nat echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.4.0.1/2 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
Next up is generating a shared key for authentication/encryption.
cd /etc/openvpn sudo openvpn --genkey --secret ovpn.key
Here’s a basic conf file (/etc/openvpn/openvpn.conf). Read the OpenVPN man page for more options.
port 1194 proto tcp-server dev tun1 ifconfig 10.4.0.1 10.4.0.2 status server-tcp.log verb 3 secret ovpn.key
Now to start it and follow the status:
sudo service openvpn start tail -f /etc/openvpn/server-tcp.log
Make sure tcp port 1194 is open in your instance’s security group!
scp/email/ftp/rsync/nc the ovpn.key file to your client machine.
Start OpenVPN client on your client machine:
export EC2_IP=0.0.0.0 sudo openvpn \ --proto tcp-client \ --remote $EC2_IP \ --port 1194 \ --dev tun1 \ --secret ovpn.key \ --redirect-gateway def1 \ --ifconfig 10.4.0.2 10.4.0.1 \ --daemon
Now if you visit www.whatismyip.org it should be your EC2 Instance’s IP.
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