Turn your Shells into a VPN server from your Smart TV, Android, iPhone or Computer.

With Shells^TM you can run a VPN (Virtual Private Network) server using OpenVPN on Ubuntu. And this can be done right from your smart TV, Android or iPhone as well. With a VPN server you can have multiple devices connected on the same network for easy file sharing or to encrypt your connection when accessing a public hotspot like at a cafe on an unsecured network. In this article we will be configuring an OpenVPN server on Ubuntu 20.04 in five steps:

1. Updating your System
2. Finding your public IP
3. Server Installation
4. Adding Clients 
5. Connecting Clients

Step 1 - Updating your System

Update Ubuntu with apt command to run system update

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Step 2 - Finding your public IP

If you have purchased a public IP, you can find it on your Shells Dash board once logged into your account by selecting “Your Shells^TM” on left side panel then clicking on Edit to the right of your selected shell. You should see your public IP address displaying to the right of Host:

Step 3 – Server installation

Download and run openvpn-install.sh bash script using wget

wget https://git.io/vpn -O openvpn-ubuntu-install.sh

Next we need to make the script executable using chmod

sudo chmod -v +x openvpn-ubuntu-install.sh

You should see output as below:

Now we can run openvpn-ubuntu-install.sh script to install OpenVPN server

sudo ./openvpn-ubuntu-install.sh

Follow the steps as the script runs confirming your public IP, selecting DNS and creating a user by pressing enter to go to each next step. See below:

Now lets move the user file we created using the mv command to make it easier to locate and access. This is the client opvn file we just created.

sudo mv ~root/myshelluser1.opvn ~ubuntuuser/myshelluser1.opvn

Make sure to replace the ubuntu user and file name with your username and file name.

Restart/enable OpenVPN server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Lets use systemctl to restart OpenVPN so the configuration is applied, enable it so that it will run at startup and verify that it is running with the status command.

Restart the OpenVPN server

sudo systemctl restart openvpn-server@server.service

Enable the OpenVPN server

sudo systemctl enable openvpn-server@server.service

Status of the OpenVPN server

sudo systemctl status openvpn-server@server.service

Status output:

Next we need to open UDP port 1164 using ufw so we can access the server remotely.

sudo ufw allow 1194/udp

To enable the ufw firewall on Ubuntu 20.04 see article Is there a firewall in my Shell?

Step 4 – Adding Clients

To add clients we just need to run the script again and press option 1.

sudo ./openvpn-ubuntu-install.sh

Running the script again, also, will allow you to remove users, or uninstall the OpenVPN server.

Step 5 - Connecting Clients

You can now copy the client opvn file, in my case the shellsuser1.opvn file, using SCP (Linux/MacOS), WinSCP (Windows), AndFTP (Android) or FTPManager (Apple iOS).

Once you have your opvn file transferred over to your device, you can use the OpenVPN client software to connect.

• Apple iOS client
• Android client
• Apple MacOS client
• Windows client

I used the Windows client and imported the ovpn file to connect to my server. Now I can ping both server and client and share the same network as my Shells^TM from a Windows, Mac, or Android/ iPhone by just importing the opvn file.