VPN

This is the sixth part of a multi-part tutorial describing how to configure the "perfect" Kodi media centre running on top of ubuntu server. Other parts of the tutorial may be found here:

• Introduction and Overview
• Part 1: Kodi installation and configuration
• Part 2: NFS file sharing
• Part 3: Auto-mounting hard drives with Udev
• Part 4: Remote administration with SSH
• Part 5: Transmission torrent client
• Part 6: VPN connection
• Part 7: Firewall configuration with UFW

This section covers configuration of an openvpn client connection to an external server, to anonymise traffic to and from the Kodi box and prevent bandwidth throttling of torrent traffic by your ISP. You will also find some additional configuration to ensure the VPN does not break secure SSH connections from the public internet via your router, and some scripts to make sure Transmission binds to the local IP address of the VPN interface (so it doesn't try and send traffic out over your public connection if the VPN goes down).

I recently purchased a VPN service from Private Internet Access (PIA), because I wanted to learn about openvpn and thought it would be a neat way to get an outside view of my network. At £25/year, I think PIA is great value. PIA provides a shell script that you can run to set up the OpenVPN to connect to their servers, but I wanted to know how to do it manually. It took me a while to figure out exactly how to connect to it using Kubuntu's Network Management widget, so hopefully this will save you some trouble. This method should be the same for any distribution using a recent version KDE's Plasma desktop.