Free home VPN server with PiVPN: taking advantage of your old Raspberry Pi.

PiVPN is a project to install a Virtual Private Network in your Raspberry Pi. It's very easy to install, since it only requires to execute a script and follow the instructions in http://www.pivpn.io Use it along a software like OpenVPN to use it everywhere.



Insert this command in the console: curl -L https://install.pivpn.io | bash

In the summer of 2016, I tried several times to install a VPN in my raspberry pi. All the process is a long task, it may cost you several days. With PiVPN you can do the whole process in a few hours. It is recommended to use a (free) DDNS service in the case you have a dynamic IP.

Remember that in order to have the VPN 24/7 you'll have to have the raspberry pi connected 24/7. The good part of embedded systems like raspberry pi is that is has a low power consumption (2W the first model)

It's a great option as a home VPN server and good use for your unused raspberry pi.

For what can a home VPN server be useful?

1) Secure connection between to nodes of the internet. Use to enter a private intranet from the internet. This can be done, for instance, in business environments, or in the case you want to access a local net (intranet) from the internet. I've used it for some university services as well, for instance: access to Sciencedirect paid services from my computer connected to a university computer with the premium subscription to Sciencedirect. With that I can access to all the scientific papers without the requirement to physically be in the university. If you are a worker and you are ill, or you are pregnant, you can use it as well to work from home. By the way, Disney Pixar's Toy Story was deleted by a wrong linux command by a worker, and it was saved thanks to a pregnant woman who worked at home months after his chilbirth through a VPN and had all the data stored in his PC.

2) Connect to some forbidden web services in some countries. e.g. in China Facebook, Google and Twitter are forbidden by the great firewall, so if you own a VPN in your country, you can use it and save a lot of money for paid vpn's. (6$ a month). *

3) Connect to the internet in a safe way in public wifi connections. A very popular man-in-the-middle attack on airports, bars and cafeterias is a free wifi node where the owner sniffs all of your traffic with a software like wireshark, so he can detect all your traffic and inputs like passwords, names etc. With the VPN all the connections through internet are encrypted in a private, secure connection, so it's going to be much harder to steal your data.

Some economic analysis:

Considering a raspberry pi at full work consumes 2W*h, and in my country's kw*h is something like 12 cents of € per kw*h, the electricity cost of the raspberry  (considering is at full work 24h a day, worst case scenario) it's only 10 cents of euro yearly!
Ok, you need to pay off the 35€ cost of the raspberry pi. Let's suppose you use the Raspberry Pi for 5 years as a home VPN server. You have a yearly cost of 7.10€ per year, but remember, your Raspberry Pi could be used for other tasks, like a bittorrent server, an open cloud server, or even a light web server.

Your hoe VPN could be used to host more than one user, so, for instance, you can sell your service to a friend or someone else for a below-market price and get some profits from it. If you already bought a raspberry pi and you aren't giving it any use, it could be a nice way of taking advantage of it. It's a great option if you already have an internet connection at home without a lot of use and you already have a raspberry pi (and it's a fixed cost you can't save).

* For a VPN, is very important the download and upload capacity of your home internet. e.g: 100 Mbit/s download and 10 Mbit/s upload would be bad because it would mean you could only get a 10 Mbit/s download from your vpn node, this is something like 1.25 MBytes/s.