Instead, the admin needs to start the VPN connection. Installing and configuring Pritunl does not automatically run a VPN server, as is the case with OpenVPN. The web interface not only lets you manage users, but also the VPN instances that you want to launch. This removes the annoyance of separate VPN access data, but only – and this is the unfriendly bit – if you decide to go for the Enterprise subscription. When the administrator then assigns the users created in this way to one of the "organizations" (I'll come back to that later), the VPN connection is opened. Once the user has logged in to Google, they are also viewed as logged in to Pritunl. In the next step, you let Pritunl receive the Google registration confirmation. In the login window, you choose to use SSO to authenticate against Google. If you have a Google account, you use the same approach for Pritunl as for logging into other web services with your account. However, it has another trick up its sleeve: Pritunl supports single sign-on (SSO) authentication based on the Google authorization system. The Pritunl web interface also lets you handle user management, which only exists locally. All told, the entire Pritunl setup takes less than five minutes. At the end, Pritunl writes its own nf based on your details. If you are installing on a single server, the defaults are fine. The tool asks for the MongoDB database name that you want to use. Only a simple nf file specifies the port on which to access the web interface and how Pritunl reaches its MongoDB data.ĭirectly after launching the program for the first time, Pritunl welcomes users with a wizard that walks them through the basic configuration. The settings configured in the web interface end up directly in MongoDB. Keeping configuration data in a database also is far more flexible than maintaining static configuration files, which you will not find with Pritunl: a fixed part of Pritunl is a web interface for handling the user-facing configuration. The configuration back end for this kind of construct is easy to implement, thanks to the database – in particular because the database comes with its own cluster functionality. In scale-out environments with multiple Pritunl instances at multiple locations, the Pritunl servers exchange data about their configurations, and they use MongoDB to do so. Why does a VPN server need a database? As it turns out, Pritunl uses MongoDB to store and manage its own settings in the background. When you install Pritunl, MongoDB is also installed as a mandatory requirement. Installing is not difficult with these repositories: many of the guides focus on enabling the repository locally and then using the package manager to install the Pritunl package. The vendor also has something for RPM-based systems such as CentOS 7 or the current Fedora release. The vendor offers its own software repositories for popular distributions, such as the current stable version of Debian and the current LTS release of Ubuntu, 14.04. Can the program really offer more? Is it really as easy to install as OpenVPN? And, what about the Pritunl Enterprise products ? Pritunl, built on the OpenVPN protocol, is sounding the attack: Pritunl simply promises to be the perfect VPN solution for practically any implementation and to exceed the functionality and convenience of OpenVPN alone. Ideally, establishing a working client-server setup with OpenVPN will take you just a few minutes. Clients for Windows, Linux, and OS X are naturally also available. Moreover, OpenVPN is very easy to set up on the client side: Android comes with an OpenVPN client out of the box, and if you use iOS, you will find a matching tool in the App Store. When you finish installing Ubuntu 14.04, for example, all you need to do is add the openvpn package to operate an OpenVPN server. However, what should be your tool of choice for this task?Īt one time, IPsec was more or less the standard in all things VPN however, in the course of many years, OpenVPN has built up an excellent reputation for security and ease of use. Businesses often need to give their road warriors access to the enterprise IT, and some private users also appreciate the ability to "phone home." With an increasing numbers of households depositing their personal documents on large networked drives, it's little wonder that many people need to be able to access their data at home via VPN when they are on the road.
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