Private Internet Access VPN
PIA is a subscription based service provided from the PIA. From the PIA's How It Works page:
- PRIVATE INTERNET ACCESS provides state of the art, multi-layered security with advanced privacy protection using VPN tunneling.
Contents
Requirements
PIA supports nearly any operating system and solution any user would need. This guide automatically sets up the configurations for PIA which works for most Arch Linux users.
Installation
Install the private-internet-access-vpnAUR package.
The package downloads the OPENVPN CONFIGURATION FILES (DEFAULT) and stores them in /etc/openvpn
. However, it updates the file names to better support using them on the command line.
Configuration for the package is stored in /etc/private-internet-access
Usage
Enabling auto-login
Enabling auto-login allows a user to connect to the VPN service without having type any passwords on the command line (needed when using networkmanager). To set this up, you must do the following:
- Create
/etc/private-internet-access/login.conf
- Add your username and password in the file. Make sure LINE 1 is your username and LINE 2 is your password. Do not add any other text to the file or it will not work (this is a limitation of OpenVPN):
/etc/private-internet-access/login.conf
USERNAME PASSWORD
- Change permissions of the file to 0600 and owner to root:root:
# chmod 0600 /etc/private-internet-access/login.conf # chown root:root /etc/private-internet-access/login.confThis secures the access to the file from non-root users. Read more on File permissions and attributes. It is required when activating auto-login.
- Run
pia -a
as root.- If you have networkmanager installed, it will created the configuration files for networkmanager. Make sure to restart networkmanager to see them.
- If you have connman installed, it will create the configuration files for connman. Start
connman-vpn.service
if not running already. It will auto load the profiles.
Manually Connecting to VPN
Run openvpn --config /etc/openvpn/{config_file_name}
as root. {config_file_name} will be listed in the /etc/openvpn directory.
Automatically connect to VPN
- For connman:
-
enable the
connman-vpn.service
. - Run
pia -a
as root.
- For openvpn you can look here: OpenVPN#systemd service configuration.