from Hacker News

Do you use VPN for security?

by cheae on 11/11/10, 4:25 AM with 5 comments

• by christefano on 11/11/10, 8:35 AM

  PersonalVPN from Witopia has served me well for almost two years. I'd been meaning to get a VPN for a while for security reasons (I'd been using SSH port forwarding up to that point) but I really wanted to watch Moving Wallpaper on ITV and needed an IP address in the UK. Nowadays, I don't think I'll use any other VPN service unless I end up installing OpenVPN on one of my servers.

  http://witopia.org/index.php/products/

  When I originally chose Witopia, it cost about as much as the others I considered. The last I checked, though, Witopia had something like 60 endpoints in 20 countries and actually costs less than other VPN providers (StrongVPN, mentioned in another comment, offers 4 endpoints in 3 countries, and costs about $10 more).

  They also started including Viscocity (a VPN client similar to Tunnelblick) as part of the package, and it comes preconfigured with all their VPN connections. I had actually purchased Viscocity separately and think it's a great VPN client for Mac OS X.

  http://www.thesparklabs.com/viscosity/

  I don't know if they bundle a VPN client for Windows or Linux.

• by noonespecial on 11/11/10, 4:57 AM

  Absolutely. I have many colo-ed servers so I put OpenVPN server on a few of them. My MacBook has tunnelblick with the "redirect-gateway def1" directive in the config. This automatically redirects all outbound traffic over the VPN, no matter how the computer gets its internet (wifi, wired, tether etc)

  Not only is it secure, bur wherever I am in the world, my IP is in San Jose. No worries about pandora or netflix not working.

  The people I work with were so impressed that my netflix worked while I was in Australia, that they all wanted on my server too. The security was just lagniappe.

• by _b8r0 on 11/11/10, 5:15 PM

  Yup, I have a strongswan IPSEC rig with two-factor authentication that I use for a private darknet, and a second account on the same box that lets me access the Internet.

  I also use VyprVPN at home for when I want to watch something restricted to the US. I still have to configure my VPN client to kick in on specific IP ranges automatically so that I can get BBC iPlayer and Hulu in a more wife-friendly manner.

• by ryanto on 11/11/10, 4:28 AM

  Yup, the service I use is strongvpn.com. Had them for about a year, no complaints.

• by gcb on 11/11/10, 8:43 AM

  `ssh -D 8080 me@trusty.example.com`

  then configure your computer to use socks proxy at localhost:8080