Raspberry Pi VPN Router Setup is a shell program for setting up a Raspberri Pi as VPN router.

This setup will yield a wireless network connected to Internet through the configured VPN; if the VPN connection falls for any reason, the internet connection will be unavailable until the VPN will be up again ("kill switch").

There are use cases where using a RPi as VPN router is very useful, in particular, when offering an internet connection in a commercial context/location, or even at home.

There are existing routers preconfigured with this functionality (WRT/Tomato), but:

• they have very limited hardware (CPU/RAM/disk) - I doubt they're powerful enough to handle 20+ MBit/sec of traffic
• they're not as easy to configure and use, and they has much less software available, compared to Debian-based distributions

On an Raspbian-based Raspberry Pi, you can trivially install for example, a local file hosting service, an FTP server, a backup server, or many other services, with great ease and availability of information.

This project is now archived, since:

• I find it very useful, but it got no traction;
• I now own a different SBC server, and I use a different procedure to setup the VPN Router configuration (although the configuration itself is the same).

The project has also been an exercise in shell scripting. Although the quality is competent, nowadays I'm more knowledgeable in shell scripting, therefore, I consider some spots in this project suboptimal; the ZFS installer is better.

Knowledge:

• in the most basic functional form, only the VPN details are required
• the access point may need to be configured (or not, depending on the model); if it does, you will need to be able to open the administrative interface, and specify that DHCP must be used for the IP configuration

Hardware:

• the ISP modem/router
• a Raspberry Pi (any version supported by Raspbian)
• a USB Ethernet dongle
• a Wifi access point

Software/Services:

• VPN connection: you'll need a PrivateInternetAccess account (or any other VPN provider)
• host O/S: you can execute this application on any reasonably recent Ubuntu/Debian-based distro (it's been tested on an Ubuntu 16.04)

For other VPN providers, the procedure needs to be adapted; open a GitHub issue with the details, and I'll update the project.

I don't have any relation to PrivateInternetAccess, except that it's been the most reliable of all the VPN providers I've used. Of course, YMMV.

See the specific wiki page for notes about using RPi in a single-device access point+router setup.

Simple configuration:

• prepare the card by downloading and executing the script:

  curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/saveriomiroddi/rpi_vpn_router/master/install_vpn_router.sh | sudo bash -

• connect the ISP modem/router to the RPi internal ethernet port;

• insert the SD card and plug the ethernet dongle to the RPi, then boot it;

• connect the Wifi access point to the Ethernet dongle

... now enjoy the RPi VPN router!

The credentials are the standard Raspbian [user: pi, password: raspberry].