Free VPN for a lifetime in Oracle cloud

Yes you heard it right, for a lifetime! Oracle Cloud has a tremendous proposal, on their Free Tier you can use “Always Free” services including Arm Ampere A1 Compute instances. Yea you can create instances with up to 24 Gb of memory and 4 CPU cores. It can be one or a few it’s up to you, but it should be in the specified limits.

We are going to create OpenVPN server using Terraform and Ansible. Make sure you have them installed, as I won’t go into installation details here.

At this point, you’ll have set Oracle account, and it’s time to create API keys. Go to your “Profile” ➞ “API keys” and click “Add API Key”. Copy what you are given and download pem key to ~/.oci folder.

Run commands below:

git clone git@github.com:route/oracle.git && \
  cd oracle && \
  cp tf.env.example tf.env && \
  cp compute/vpn/ovpn.env.example compute/vpn/ovpn.env

Open it with your favorite editor and paste values Oracle provided to tf.env. Fill in INSTANCE_SSH_PUBLIC_KEY as well, it’s used to ssh into the server using your public ssh key. By default, we create 1 Cpu x 2 Gb machine.

Go to compute/vpn as well and fill in values for OpenVPN file ovpn.env. Set OPENVPN_EASY_RSA_* variables with arbitrary data needed for certificates. Config files are generated for clients listed in OPENVPN_CLIENTS variable. Set as many names as you’d like to have people.

If all is set then run:

./configure

After running this you’ll have a server up and running and two openvpn config files linux.ovpn and mac.ovpn downloaded in compute/vpn/ansinle/clients folder. Now you can use them to browse internet privately. For linux you can set up OpenVPN tunnel in settings, for mac I prefer Viscosity.

If you’d like to add more clients, change ovpn.env and run (cd compute/vpn && ./configure run openvpn_clients)