Have you been looking for a good guide or tutorial for installing openvpn on a raspberry pi or ubuntu based server? Run this script and you don't need a guide or tutorial, this will do it all for you, in a fraction of the time and with hardened security settings in place by default.
Jessie, Stretch, Devuan and has been tested on Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 running from an Amazon AWS image.
We recommend using the Stretch or Jessie Lite image on a raspberry pi in your home so you can VPN into your home from unsecure remote locations and safely use the internet. However, the scripts do try to detect different distributions and make adjustments accordingly. They should work on the majority of Ubuntu and Debian based distributions including those using UFW by default instead of raw iptables.
This scripts primary mission in life is to allow a user to have a home VPN for as cost effective as possible and without being a technical wizard. Hence the design of pivpn to work on a Raspberry Pi ($35) and then one command installer. Followed by easy management of the VPN thereafter with the 'pivpn' command. That being said...
> This will also work on a free-tier Amazon AWS server using Ubuntu 14.04 - 16.04. I don't want to support every scenario there but getting it to run and install successfully on a free server in the cloud was also important. Many people have untrustworthy ISP's so running on a server elsewhere means you can connect to the VPN from home and your ISP will just see encrypted traffic as your traffic will now be leaving out the amazon infrastructure.
> For asymmetric keys, general wisdom is that 1024-bit keys are no longer sufficient to protect against well-equipped adversaries. Use of 2048-bit is a good minimum. It is wise to ensure all keys across your active PKI (including the CA root keypair) are using at least 2048-bit keys.
> Up to 4096-bit is accepted by nearly all RSA systems (including OpenVPN), but use of keys this large will dramatically increase generation time, TLS handshake delays, and CPU usage for TLS operations; the benefit beyond 2048-bit keys is small enough not to be of great use at the current time. It is often a larger benefit to consider lower validity times than more bits past 2048, but that is for you to decide.
Luckily, OpenVPN 2.4 supports ECDSA certificates, which are based on Elliptic Curves, allowing much smaller keys while providing an equivalent security level (256 bit long, equivalent to 3072 bit RSA). For this reason, PiVPN now uses ECDSA certs if you choose to enable OpenVPN 2.4 features. If not, the usual RSA certificates are generated in case the user has clients running an older version of OpenVPN.
#### Please read carefully the [issue template](https://github.com/pivpn/pivpn/blob/master/ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md) and the [contributors' guide](https://github.com/pivpn/pivpn/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md), we will close all incomplete issue templates.
PiVPN is purely community driven, and we are interested in making this script work for as many people as possible, we welcome any feedback on your experience.
1. I began this as a rough merger of the code at [OpenVPNSetup](https://github.com/StarshipEngineer/OpenVPN-Setup) who you can donate to at [this PayPal link](https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=K99QGVL7KA6ZL)
PiVPN is not taking donations at this time but if you want to show your appreciation, then contribute or leave feedback on suggestions or improvements.
