VPNs are good for a lot of tasks since they offer a secure connection, especially if you are connecting via a non-secure public network.
In this case, I’ll get a US Vultr VPS and get OpenVPN on it to check my live US rankings in Google, since all the results I got from Bulgaria are not that relevant and all the free web proxies and other so-called tools to check rankings from other countries are not reliable.
Here is a great step-by-step guide on how to set up OpenVPN on VPS from DigitalOcean. Here is a PDF Version in case the article at DO goes 404.
In this article, I will cover everything that does not work out of the box with the article guide.
The VPS I got is already running Ubuntu 16.04 with EasyEngine to run WordPress on it.
So, let’s begin.
- On step 4 of the guide, after editing the vars, it throws an error
No /root/openvpn-ca/openssl.cnf file could be found
Further invocations will fail
To fix that, open vars again with nano vars and edit the file so it looks like this
export KEY_CONFIG=$EASY_RSA/openssl-1.0.0.cnf
This works. Save the file and proceed with the guide.
Aaaand actually that’s about it. If you follow all the steps of the guide, the VPN on the server actually works flawlessly.
Just make sure when you browse you are logged off your google account and you’ll see the results in search based on the location your server is. Cool stuff.
Problems with your Web Server after installing OpenVPN
I had several WordPress sites on the same VPS that I used for VPN. After the installation they were not loading.
If you have followed the guide step by step, the issue is the Firewall.
It needs to allow traffic from http on port 80/tcp and traffic from https on port 443/tcp
How to fix that? Connect to the sever as root with SSH. Type:
sudo ufw allow 80/tcp
And then
sudo ufw allow 443/tcp
This should fix the problem.