When making decisions as to what to use to make your own VPN, a cool challenge can be to use an old laptop or Raspberry Pie combined with OpenVPN to do everything yourself, and we'll see here how we can do that, but remember there are multiple ways to deploy such a service.

Let's see what do we need to run such a service on our own machine.

Here we'll use an old HP laptop as machine, with Debian 12 as OS, but you could use almost any hardware/software combination, even a VM if you want. We made the choice of a physical machine because we had a spare one, and also because if our hypervisor is down at some point, there may be some problem while trying to starting virtual machines back therefore no more VPN, meaning that we could have to be on site to put the VPN back up.

On your linux distribution, you must have the package curl installed in order to follow the installations. If you don't, here's how to install it using apt:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install curl

First we'll download an installer file, and then run it:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Angristan/openvpn-install/master/openvpn-install.sh

The file won't be seen as an executable, so we need to change that:

chmod +x ./openvpn-install.sh

Then we run it with root privileges:

sudo ./openvpn-install.sh