we all know how incredibly frustrating it is to be locked out of sites and apps
you might rely on for work or pleasure Tik Tok The Hub and many other services
are being restricted or outright banned in parts of the world but don't fret for
there is a Shining Light in the darkness the VPN say a website is blocking users
in your country by connecting to a VPN in a different country that website will
think you're there and boom no more block and today we're going to show you
a few ways to do just that level one where all you need is a credit card
level two where you get to set up your own VPN and don't worry it's easy and
then there's my favorite level three where I tell you about our sponsor next
to go their new Aurora Pro Mark I projector Sports an improved 4,000 to1
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Link in the video description
before you decide how you're going to tackle a VPN it's important to
understand why you need one in the first place and I figure there's four main use
cases first getting around throttling blocking or banss like your school or
government blocking websites accessing region locked content like a different
country's Netflix Library obscuring your IP address for privacy or torrenting
legal stuff like Linux isos of course and securely accessing a remote Network
like your home or business from somewhere else if you fall into any of
the first three categories especially torrenting and you want the easiest
solution there's level one using one of the many public VPN providers our
personal favorite is private internet access and all you've got to do to get
these going is sign up download their client and hit connect boring whoa whoa
whoo there's nothing wrong with taking the easy route but it doesn't mean
you're not in control of your data and even a VPN provider who's trustworthy
today could change their behavior in the future for instance if they got bought
out by a different company so let's talk level two where you get to your very own
private VPN server while there just about a million different ways to skin
this cat the setup I'm going to show you today isn't scary requires virtually
zero maintenance and puts you in control and you might even learn something along
the way like this disclaimer anything we show you today is purely in the interest
of education and privacy we aren't condoning or recommending piracy bypassing legislative banss or anything
similar the illegal implications of your actions are your own responsibility
thanks Riley if you're following along at home you're going to want to check out the GitHub repo we have linked down
in the description because that's where you're going to find all the necessary files along with some step-by-step
instructions in case you get lost Public vpns Work by tunneling your internet
traffic through a dedicated computer in a Data Center and replace your IP
address along the way that's the part that hides your location and we're going
to do basically the same thing by renting a small piece of a computer from
a cloud hosting provider they have data centers all over the world with
thousands of servers that are split up into what they call vpss or virtual
private servers with the magic of virtualization if you've seen has talked
about virtual machines before it's the exact same thing if you're comfortable
using a Linux command line you should be able to replicate our setup with
virtually any cloud provider but if you're not and for the sake of
Simplicity we're going to be using vulture they're not a sponsor but we had
great results with their high frequency tier so start by signing up there and
we'll come back to it in a sec if we're being honest traditionally setting up a
VPN it's complicated and it requires maintenance to keep things secure and
reliable so instead of walking you through how to do all of that and keep
it maintained we we distilled the entire setup down into a single config file
literally this these 100ish lines contain all the information our server
needs to set up the VPN create a firewall to keep it secure and handle
automatic updates for both the operating system and the VPN software which is
called tail scale it has a ton of cool features but most importantly for us it
makes the setup much easier and it allows us to use existing accounts like
Google or GitHub to log in and the free plan is good for three users or 100
clients so good there once you're logged into tail scale head to the key section
of the settings and generate an off key which is basically a fancy password our
VPN server is going to use to log in that o key has to make its way into the
config file I showed you earlier but that can be tricky and kind of easy to
screw up so we made a custom tool which will be linked in the GitHub that you
can paste your key into and then it'll spit out a config ready to go for the
Nerds out there who want to be able to remote into the machine you'll probably want to add an SSH key but if you don't
know what that means just skip this step so we've got our VPN software and we've
got a config file now we need to get them on vulture and that's where flat
car a lightweight operating system built for high security and more importantly
low maintenance comes into play you see it's like it's a little train car with
containers on it the container that's our VPN anyways back on vulture click
deploy new server and select the region you want to use if you're not trying to
get around region restrictions you can pick whatever region is closest to you
if you are pick whatever region is closest to you in an area that doesn't
have those restrictions now there are a lot of plans to choose from but we found
these shared CPU highfrequency ones to be the best bang for your buck
specifically the $6 a month base plan which includes a terabyte of bandwidth
per month and can handle gigabit speeds without issue you might be able to make
it work with cheaper tier so let us know down in the description how that goes
disable automatic backup since we won't be storing any data on the machine
select the stable version of flat car container Linux and then select Cloud
init user data and that's where you're going to be pasting the configuration we
generated earlier hit deploy and while we're wai waiting for the VPN server to
show up in tail scale's dashboard it's a great time to download tail scale on
whatever device you want to use your VPN with so go to their website hit download
install and then once it's installed log in if you're on macOS you have to agree
to a few system prompts but once that's done it should just connect once you're
logged in you should see your client in the tail scale dashboard and hopefully
by now also your VPN server which we have to make a few changes to First you
want to go into edit route settings and then select use as exit node this is
going to allow us to Tunnel our client's traffic to the VPN server and then you
want to disable key expiry and you might also want to do this for your client as
well if you don't do this after 180 days the VPN server will stop being able to
connect to tailscale and just stop working as a VPN assuming you've done
everything correctly you should have yourself a functioning self-updating bpn
server and I'm sure you did great but now is a good time to check our work so
open up command prompt or terminal if you're on macOS like me and run ping
VPN server if everything's working you should see responses with the latency
listed and if it's not well go back a few steps and make sure you've followed
everything correctly assuming this is working you're then going to want to run
tail scale status which if you're on macOS is a little bit more complicated I'll
just copy paste that boom status and you
should see Direct in the response that means you're making a direct connection
to the VPN server if you see relay here instead you might have a funky or
restrictive firewall that's blocking the connection and you can try asking for
help on the LTT Forum or Discord server if all looks good like this W deskpad
from LTT Store.com you can go ahead and finally try it out so go to tail scale
in your taskbar select exit nodes and then click on VPN server at this point
we're now tunneling our own traffic through our very own VPN server assuming
we still have internet let me try pinging ping hey it's still working sick
thanks we just have to try it out let's go what is my IP
address that's kind of the easiest way to figure it out hey I see an IP address
that's different than the network that I'm actually on and you can see our ISP
shows as vulture Holdings great job now
you should only have to select the exit node once per device it should remember
the settings but if you're ever unsure it does actually change the icon in the
taskbar or you can use a website like I just showed you to check your external
IP address now this setup can work great if your goal is to better protect your
privacy or to get around throttling or region blocks and at this point you can
go ahead and test it out but if you're trying to get around a potential Tik Tok
ban or maybe another app for instance you might still be locked out since some
of these services use other things to determine your location like the App
Store region you downloaded from sometimes GPS location or maybe even
your account billing information if that's the case you can try changing
your app store region and redownloading for instance but if you can't get that
to work the web version in a web page on your computer or your phone should still
work now if you're trying to use another country's Netflix Library they like most
streaming services aggressively block hosting VPN and data center related IP
addresses so this setup probably won't work your best bet is one of the more
streaming oriented public VPN providers or if you happen to have a friend in the
country of choice hosting a VPN at their house could also be a workable solution
what's less workable is torrenting I mentioned earlier that torrenting is a
great use case for public vpns that's because whether you're trying to avoid
dmca notices or circumvent ISP throttling practically all big cloud
providers will for forward abuse reports from your totally legal Torance directly
to you and depending on their terms of service they might even suspend your
server there are hosting companies that operate in countries that don't abide by
the dmca and therefore don't care so if you're looking for that Google is your
friend but you may have to get a little bit more manual on the setup now if you
fall into the last Camp of wanting to remotely access your home or business
Network without having to port forward like to check security cameras or stream
video games or Hell run a Minecraft server you you can easily do that with
tail scale no VPS required and therefore for free just install the tail scale
client directly on the device you want to access like say your Minecraft server
and then on your Remote device and log them into the same account you can even
run it in subnet routing mode and share services on other devices or even your
entire network just keep in mind that by default tail scale doesn't block any
connections within the little tail scale Network so if you do explore it we
recommend locking things down with their access control rules especially if
inviting your friends put that all together and assuming you didn't take the easy route in just a few minutes
you've got your very own low maintenance automatically updating VPN server that's
easily capable of reaching full gigabit speeds where you're in control of your
own data and if you don't want it anymore just get rid of
it delete boom now all you're left with
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if you like this video why not check out our last server room update I think it
was called our network is bigger than yours that was a good one and you should
watch it