Right, we are just about to set our VPN up, but first of all we need to check and double-check that we have a 'good one' for our purposes.
One thing to look for in VPNs before splashing the cash (if you are a noob), or rather TWO things to look for, are:
1: A Kill Switch for dropped connections.
2: The ability to stop DNS Leaks.
For this purpose we will be using Mullvad vpn (A Swedish vpn provider), which provides both services built in to their client (the software you download to get things set up).
https://mullvad.net/
Mullvad are a reputable company, and they only charge about a fiver a month (so not cheap, but not expensive). They also tick many other boxes. But I am not endorsing them FOR YOU. But they work for me and I can't think of a better example to get working quickly in both Windows and Linux. You get 3 hours to test which is stingy as fuck, but it should be enough time to see if it works or not. They aren't my main vpn, but they are the easiest to set up on both win and linux, so I am using them here. No affiliation what so ever.
A quick bit of background of why we need a 'Kill switch' and 'DNS leak protection'.
Many VPNs do not have this feature, and for whatever reason when your connection is lost to the vpn, the way networking works on most systems dictates that it will then revert to your standard ISP with your standard IP shown to the world. In fact you can have everything working perfectly and still leak your IP to the world, via WebRTC, but more on that later.
Three bogie men to watch out for:
1: Protection against dropped connections via a kill switch.
2: Making sure that WebRTC is turned off in your particular browser.
3: Disabling of WebGL.
We will cover these later in more depth, but let's just get that god damned VPN set up ah rigsby!
So, you have gone to Mullvad's website and followed the instructions - you have downloaded their client (gui) for your particular OS which will allow you to select options and select servers from all over the planet. You can do this in both windows and linux, but we will start with windows.
You install the client, you select: 'Block the internet on connection failure' - this is your kill switch for dropped connections. You also select to 'protect against Dns leaks'. All good.
When you have it installed it will as you to run it. Go ahead.
Now, time to get checking, checking, checking: fire up your command shell and your pings. What are they saying? Pretty soon, they should stop working all together giving all kinds of errors such as general connection failures etc. - all good. When Mullvad VPN starts it should kill your normal connection totally.
Give it some time - perhaps a few minutes. Let it find the connection. On windows mine takes ages but on linux it takes seconds. Still pinging? Good! Now you will see when mullvad connects you will be connect to the internet, but your ping times should be noticably worse. This is good and to be expected. It will not affect general internet performance unless doing real time gaming or other some such stuff.
Bingo! We are live. We got our vpn up and working and we are ready to rock. But we need to make a few more tests first. We know the vpn is working, but we are not sure about other stuff that betrays our true identity to the world.
I will cover that in my next post.
There are instructions on the mullvad website for installing on both windows and linux. I can confirm that the installation on linux is as easy as it gets, even for a noob like me. In fact, I had more problems on windows 7. I am running linux mint 17 based on Ubuntu 14.04 just to confirm. There are instructions for other specific linux systems, but just wanted to say that this will work (up until 16.04 - the latest version iirc) of Ubuntu. Mint is based on ubuntu.
So far, so platform independent. We can ping easily from linux as well, and all the other tools we need to check the veracity of our vpn are browser based. So let's get to it...