TECH

PiVPN: How to Secure Your Home Connection via VPN for Free

Do you need to securely connect to the Internet in different environments? If you have a public IP address, you might want to use your own VPN. There is a relatively simple way to create it using a Raspberry PI minicomputer and Wireguard VPN. It also works on Ubuntu and Debian distributions. The instructions can also be partially used in a VPS environment.

Why have your own VPN?...If someone has their own public IP address, one of the reasons to use their own VPN can be to save money. Why pay commercial fees when I need to connect from other locations so I can see on the network that I'm in the Czech Republic?

However, even if you don't need to deal with this situation, it has advantages in terms of safety and possibly convenience.

-Security is especially important in a situation where we need to log in from an unsecured Wi-Fi network to services with high security requirements. I would behave the same way when moving on any other network where I don't trust security. In everyday life, most often it is Internet Banking.

-From the point of view of convenience and also security, it is about secure access to your home, to your own data at any time, when necessary. So we don't have to worry if we don't have the exact file we might need on our cell phone or laptop, just have it available on our home storage.

In case we have a public IP address, we can have a VPN installed at home. However, a VPS service can also be used.

I'll take a look at the PiVPN project, a program that solves simplified installation and configuration for OpenVPN and WireGuard VPN programs. It is primarily intended for the Raspberry PI microcomputer, but it also works on Ubuntu and Debian distributions. The pivpn.io project website.(https://pivpn.io/)

They can also be downloaded directly from the command line. For that we can use this command that also starts the program.

curl -L https://install.pivpn.io | bash

And we come to the actual installation and configuration of the version with WireGuard.

by Tomáš Němec