Setting up PPTP VPN on Linode VPS

Linode is a VPS hosting company built upon one simple premise: provide the best possible tools and services to those that what they need.

I have a VPS on Linode, my blog runs on it, you can do any thing you want to do. For example we need to set up a PPTP VPN, it was based on Ubuntu Server 11.10 64bit.

Fir of all, you should update your sources.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

Now we can start to install VPN server, It's very easy to be set up with PPTP which is a kind of VPN Protocol.

$ sudo apt-get install pptpd

The only thing left to do is that we should add some configurations for pptpd.

Modify /etc/pptpd.conf, find 'localip' and 'remoteip' and replace with

localip 192.168.13.1
remoteip 192.168.13.50-100

After add the ip scope, we can continue adding users VPN with modifying /etc/ppp/chap-secrets, for example

jerry pptpd 123456 *

BTW, here 'jerry' is your username, '123456' is your password

Well, It's better to set a DNS to make sure pptpd can resove domains successfully when connected to VPN. You can modify /etc/ppp/options, try to find ms-dns and replace with Google's public DNS

ms-dns 8.8.8.8
ms-dns 8.8.4.4

Then modify /etc/sysctl.conf, try to find net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 and enable it.

How to make the settings work? try to run

$ sudo sysctl -p

you also should restart pptpd's server

$ sudo /etc/init.d/pptpd restart

Finally, we should transmit ips witl iptable

$ sudo /sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.13.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

But there is a problem here, when you restart your server, the transmitting will disappear, so we can add it into bootup script. Switch to your root user, create transmition in /etc/init.d/ directory, and add the following script

/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.13.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

You also have to make transmition executable, using

$ chmod +x transmition
$ update-rc.d transmition defaults