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Looking for a lightweight VPN client, but are not ready to spend a monthly recurring amount on a VPN? VPNs can be expensive depending upon the quality of service and amount of privacy you want. A good VPN plan can easily set you back by 10$ a month and even that doesn’t guarantee your privacy. There is no way to be sure whether the VPN is storing your confidential information and traffic logs or not. sshuttle is the answer to your problem it provides VPN over ssh and in this article we’re going to explore this cheap yet powerful alternative to the expensive VPNs. By using open source tools you can control your own privacy.

VPN over SSH – sshuttle

sshuttle is an awesome program that allows you to create a VPN connection from your local machine to any remote server that you have ssh access on. The tunnel established over the ssh connection can then be used to route all your traffic from client machine through the remote machine including all the dns traffic. In the bare bones sshuttle is just a proxy server which runs on the client machine and forwards all the traffic to a ssh tunnel. Since its open source it holds quite a lot of major advantages over traditional VPN.

Advantages of sshuttle:

Easy setup and light weight

Open Source (sshuttle GitHub)

Just needs a remote machine on which you have ssh access

No root required on the remote machine

Works on multiple platforms, including FreeBSD, Linux and MacOS

Encrypted tunnel because ssh (duh..)

Purely command line VPN tool, no waiting for those GUIs to open up

Prerequisites for sshuttle:

Root access on client machine (root on remote machine is not required).

Python 2.3 or higher installed on the remote machine.

Installing sshuttle

Ubuntu/Debian:

apt-get install sshuttle

MacOS using Homebrew:

brew install sshuttle

Installing sshuttle via pip/pip3:

sudo pip install sshuttle

Arch Linux:

pacman -S sshuttle

Installing shuttle on NixOS:

nix-env -iA nixos.sshuttle

Installing sshuttle on Fedora:

dnf install sshuttle

Installing sshuttle from source:

git clone https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle.git cd sshuttle sudo ./setup.py install

Usage

shuttle – vpn over ssh | Public IP Monitored

sshuttle -r user@remote-ip 0.0.0.0/0

Common options:

-r: remote hostname with optional username -v: verbose output (you can add additional v to make the output more verbose. --dns: Captures all the DNS queries on the client machine and resolves them using the remote machine.

Checking Public IP from the Command Line: curl -s http://ifconfig.me

wget -O - -q http://whatismyip.org/



Sample sshuttle command which forwards all dns requests to remote server and outputs in an extra verbose mode.

sshuttle -r user@remote-ip 0.0.0.0/0 -vvv --dns

You can also create an alias to save sometime in typing the command.

Alias in .bashrc :

vpn='sshuttle -r user@remote-ip 0.0.0.0/0 -v --dns'

That’s it, now you can connect to your own VPN over ssh with a simple command. It really comes in handy when you’re working on something else but need to access some blocked content in your location, simple, just fire up a terminal and run the command vpn and voila you are connected to a VPN.

But what if you don’t have a server with ssh access? Frankly it’s not very hard to get a virtual private server for free but it comes with a lot of limitations. The bandwidth maybe limited to 15GB per month or some other similar limitation. If you’re planning to route all your traffic through a VPS then it needs to have a lot of bandwidth, depending on your usage. You can nowadays get a server for very cheap, with good configuration and plenty of bandwidth. A machine with 1 gig, 2 cores, 2TB bandwidth will cost you around 25$ per year. Which is really cheap when compared to 10$ a month VPN plan. And if you really want no traces of your online activities, pay for the server using Bitcoin/Ethereum so that it can’t be traced back to you.

For cheap VPS visit: LowEndBox

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