Creating your own proxy or VPN server on a raspberry pi

[Kumagoro]

Let's start with the reason why. The wife wants to access news sites in Japan which are now blocking UK and EU traffic. I don't want to pay for a VPN connection and it would be more interesting for me to set up either a proxy or VPN server and I thought likely a raspberry pi would do the job and no doubt done before.

Where the pi will go doesn't have a great connection so I wondered if it being a proxy server would significantly lower the data use.

Other than a VPN is supposed to me more secure I do not know what other pros and cons there are. Has anyone else ever set something similar up on a pi?

Anyone have any practical advice? Cheers.

[DanceswithUnix]

I wonder if you haven't quite got how a VPN works...

A website can look at the IP address that you are browsing from, and from that look up which country you are in. By using a VPN server, you create a tunnel between you and the VPN server so you appear at the IP address of the VPN server, not at your own IP address. So if you are at home with your own VPN server, both client and VPN have the same IP address so you gain nothing.

What you would need to do is put your Raspberry Pi in another country with a VPN server. That would then work.

At work I use OpenVPN to secure the connection from people's homes to the office, which I'm sure you could run on a modern Pi. The problem would be getting it installed somewhere abroad with a firewall hole poked through so you can get to it from the UK.

I think the free version of Avast comes with a free basic VPN, if you can take the occasional nag popups.

[kalniel]

She could also use something like the Opera browser, which comes with a free VPN built in with US and Asia servers.

[AGTDenton]

I like the Opera idea, I'd forgotten they'd done this

Another fun suggestion I recently learned is go to Google Japan, assuming not blocked and use their websites Translation tool, this then appears to the site in question Google Japans IP and not yours, you can then view the site as normal.

[Jonj1611]

Could you not just buy Norton from ebay or somewhere and install that. It comes with a VPN. Norton 360 standard upwards. £20 from the Norton site or cheaper on ebay I'm sure.

Or as above Opera, I had forgotten they had that