PureVPN installation

Question

I use PureVPN in order to get a swedish ipadress enable me to see swedish television even if I live abroad. I have difficulties installing PureVPN on Ubuntu. Please help.

Answer 1

Ignore IP tables makes things complicated. Use UFW.

UFW is the default firewall in Ubuntu, so it is already installed, no need doing that, and should already be set to launch at startup.

Go in the .ovpn for the PureVPN server you want to add find the IP address of the server you are connecting to. If it is a URL (e.g. USA1.com) you'll need to resolve the URL to find IP address (since we are going to block DNS requests that don't go over VPN). Now enter the terminal. Now we are going to block all traffic on the computer.

sudo ufw default deny outgoing  

Do this for incoming also:

sudo ufw default deny incoming   

Now we want to make it so there is an exception for VPN. If you are using OpenVPN and TUN as network adapter (you most probably are) then we call the network interface as tun0.

Allow outgoing traffic on tun0:

sudo ufw allow out on tun0 from any to any  

Now security-wise you don't need to allow incoming traffic to use the internet, but you may want to require it (for example for seeding torrents this is necessary). So add it if you want:

sudo ufw allow in on tun0 from any to any  

So now all traffic is allowed on VPN and no traffic is allowed without VPN. But it's really annoying to need to turn firewall on and off each time we want to connect to a VPN, so we'll add an exception for establishing the initial connection to the VPN server.

sudo ufw allow out from any to 109.201.128.0  

Replace 109.201.128.0 in the above command with the IP of your VPN.

Now let's enable UFW:

sudo ufw enable  

Ideally you would want to only enable desired traffic on tun0 as currently tun0 is DMZed, but that's up to you. By default UFW will start up when Ubuntu does so as long as you set it to enabled you have a fail-safe activated from startup and you'll never need to touch it. Using Linux with this fail-safe and network manager GUI for OpenVPN and it works absolutely flawlessly. The way VPNs where meant to be appearing (natively integrated with a fail-safe). You can check the status and rules of UFW using the following command:

sudo ufw status  

If you aren't using Ubuntu and ufw isn't the default firewall, then in addition to enabling ufw (despite terminal saying after enabling it that it is enabled on startup this isn't true if ufw isn't a startup app) you will need to add ufw to startup apps. Ubuntu already does this for you out of the box.

Sources:
http://support.purevpn.com/pptp-configuration-guide-for-ubuntu
http://www.purevpnreview.com/

Answer 2

I'm going to compose an answer here for documentation purposes.

Step 1: Install OpenVPN

Run following command in terminal

sudo apt install network-manager-openvpn

Type Y and hit enter to continue.

Now run following two command in terminal

sudo apt install network-manager-openvpn-gnome    

Step 2: Configure PureVPN OpenVPN Connection

Now download the required OpenVPN File from

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/heartbleed/linux/linux-files.zip

This archive is going to contain a bunch of .ovpn files for TCP/UDP protocols, a .crtcertificate file and a .key key file. Extract this archive somewhere.

Now follow the following GUI steps.

• Click on Network Connection Icon…
• Go to VPN Connections and select Configure VPN…

• Click on Add
• Click on drop down menu.
• Select OpenVPN and click Create
• Insert the following info:
  • Insert Connection name: PureVPN OpenVPN
  • Insert desired Gateway: Open .ovpn file from OpenVPN folder to get the server address. You can use TCP or UDP depending on your needs. If unsure, you can use TCP. So the file you're going to open and copy server name is from is SWEDEN(V)-TCP.ovpn in TCP folder of the extracted archive. The server address will be present in front of remote and would be of the form vlus-se1-ovpn-tcp.purevpn.net
  • Select Type: Password from drop down menu
  • Insert Username provided by PureVPN
  • Insert Password provided by PureVPN
  • Click on folder icon from CA Certificate

• Go to OpenVPN downloadeds folder, select ca.crt and click Open
• Click on Advanced button
• From General tab select following options:
  • Check Use custom gateway port: For UDP insert 53 and For TCP insert 80
  • Check Use LZO data compression

Note: For TCP connectoin select Use a TCP connection

• From Security tab select following options:

  • From Cipher: Select AES-256-CBC or desired encryption
  • From HMAC Authentication: Select SHA-1

• Form TLS Authentication tab:

  • Select Use additional TLS authentication
  • Click on folder icon next to Key File

• Go to OpenVPN downloaded folder, select Wdc.key and click Open button
• Select 1 from Key Direction

• Click on OK button

  • Click on Save… button and close the Network Connections window

  • Click on Network Connection Icon…

  • Go to VPN Connections and select newly created PureVPN OpenVPN connection.

You should see a successful connection message.

Step 3: Address the slow connection issue

If you're experiencing slow speed over VPN then follow the following steps.

Run following commands in terminal

sudo iptables -A INPUT -i tun0 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A FORWARD -i tun0 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i tap0 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A FORWARD -i tap0 -j ACCEPT

Enable IP-forwarding feature. Open in terminal file sysctl.conf by issuing following command

sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf 

And add this line in the bottom

# Enable IP forwarding
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1 

Save and exit. After that apply the changes by running that command in terminal

sudo sysctl -p

Reboot the computer.

And that should be it.

Update 1

In case you still experience slow connection, try UDP. Above instructions contain information on how to use UDP (use port 53, do not check "Use a TCP connection", and use a UDP server from ovpn file located in "UDP" folder)

References

https://support.purevpn.com/openvpn-configuration-guide-for-ubuntu (all images were taken from this post)
PureVPN connects but very slow

Answer 3

Either you disclose exactly what problem you are having, or you follow one of the several general tutorial available.

Normally, installing PureVPN in Ubuntu implies using the tool provided by the company. If that does not work contact their customer support. Configuring PureVPN is often a matter of a matter of few clicks. They have full configuration instructions to help you set up Ubuntu VPN. There's a PPVP connection that can be followed step by step. Right now the tutorial with screenshots is here: http://support.purevpn.com/pptp-configuration-guide-for-ubuntu. Search the site of your VPN provider for an updated tutorial.