Your own IPSEC VPN in about 3 minutes using Digital Ocean

I have been wanting to setup my own IPSEC VPN for a while now to have a little bit of encryption from my network to the internet.  I found a good hosting provider for the VPN because it is so cheap ($5.00 a month) – Digital Ocean, then I realized that they only charge by the hour as long as you destroy the VPS. The VPN took about 30 minutes to setup. After a few times, I realized that I could turn this into a quick script. So now I can setup a VPS with a secure VPN in about two minutes, destroy it when I am done and only get charged a few pennies for having it. Here is how I do it. Please keep in mind that this has no warranty – if it melts down your server, sorry – but it hasn’t melted mine down yet!

First, sign up for an account at DigitalOcean.com (Using the link will get you $10 for free).

Then create a Ubuntu 14.04 x64 droplet and wait for the 55 seconds for the VPS to spin up. While you are waiting, download my script from Bitbucket.org.

https://bitbucket.org/alexander7567/ipsec-vpn-installer

when you are in your VPN, run the following commands:

nano vpn.sh

copy and paste the text from the script to the SSH terminal. Press [CTRL+x] then [Y], then [Enter] to save the new script.

chmod +x vpn.sh
./vpn.sh

Then you must add the users by editing the file /etc/ppp/chap-secrets. After editing the file, use the following command to make the changes:

/etc/init.d/ipsec restart;  /etc/init.d/xl2tpd restart

And you now have your very own VPN server!

 

Links:

  • Digital Ocean – VPN cloud hosting with my referral link. (Using the link will get you $10 for free)
  • BitBucket – This is where the script is housed. Feel free to fork me if you have any improvements.
  • Raymii.org – the original install instructions (I just made it into a script)

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