Workshop: A quick and simple private tunnel with OpenVPN

DATA TUNNEL

Article from Issue 60/2005
Author(s):

Firewalls sometimes prohibit everything but everyday surfing, leaving users with no hope of running IRC or streaming servers through the firewall, unless they use a virtual private networking tool like OpenVPN.

A typical firewall configuration denies everything that isn’t strictly needed for daily work. Even relatively harmless tools such as a webcam or a personal IRC server won’t operate through a firewall. Apart from begging the sysop to change the ruleset, the only workaround may be to dig a private tunnel through the firewall with OpenVPN. This article describes how to tunnel through a firewall with a VPN connection. I’ll assume you already have OpenVPN installed on your Linux system or that you know where to find it. OpenVPN is a very common application that is included with many popular Linux distributions. See your vendor documentation for more on setting up OpenVPN.

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