Setup Simple PPTP VPN server for Ubuntu and Debian

NOTE: PPTP VPN is considered insecure. Do not rely for this vpn if you need security. The security of the VPN can probably be cracked with any serious attacker. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-to-Point_Tunneling_Protocol#Security If you need security, consider using e.g. openvpn, you can setup a server easily with https://github.com/viljoviitanen/setup-simple-openvpn However, PPTP works out of the box on many operating systems, including many Linux distributions, MacOS, Windows and Android and it's easily good enough for evading country level IP blocks.

Script has been tested on Amazon EC2: Ubuntu Server 12.04.3 LTS

Digital Ocean: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Debian 7 (Wheezy)

Rackspace: Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04

Copyright 2013-2014 Viljo Viitanen [email protected] and contributors. Licensed under GPL version 2 or any later version.

INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

Amazon EC2

Allow the following through the firewall ("security group")

• ICMP (all)
• TCP port 22 (SSH)
• TCP port 1723

See the screenshot of the rules from EC2 www console at https://github.com/viljoviitanen/setup-simple-pptp-vpn/wiki/Amazon-EC2-firewall-security-group-instructions

Common

wget https://raw.github.com/viljoviitanen/setup-simple-pptp-vpn/master/setup.sh
sudo sh setup.sh

Let the script run. Take note if the server external ip address detection is succesful.

Get your computer to use the VPN. Try googling for instructions, e.g. https://www.google.com/#q=setup+pptp+windows+8

Note: at least on Ubuntu Desktops and probably other Linuxes as well, you need to enable MPPE encryption from advanced settings!

Enjoy your very own (somewhat insecure) VPN!

Some notes

Clients are configured to use Google public dns servers when the vpn connection is active: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/

Only one vpn account is generated. To add more accounts, see the file /etc/ppp/chap-secrets

If you keep the vpn server generated with this script on the internet for a long time (days or more), consider either restricting access to the ssh port on the server by ip addresses to the networks you use, if you know the addresses you are most likely to use or at least change ssh from port 22 to a random port.

You can also specify you own username and password, run sh setup.sh -h for help.