Setting up laptop VPN
Hi. I'm a brand new firewalla user. Setup went well - I added both my iPhone and iPad to access and manage the device. (I even get alerts to my Apple Watch. Kinda cool.)
The VPN feature seems to work and I got it available on my iOS devices. Since I use an Apple Airport Express, the tips here on working around UPnP worked perfectly.
I can't quite suss out how to hook it up on my Mac laptop, though. Attempts to get it working on my laptop seems to involve installing one or the other OpenVPN client and they all want a subscription, something having my own device should help me avoid?
Is there a series of steps we can document here for Mac OS VPN users as well? Thanks!
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George, glad you got things working. Will make a short tutorial on that soon.
We use https://tunnelblick.net/ client for the MAC. It is free, open source, and works pretty well with Firewalla.
What you need to do now is:
1. install tunnelblick software on mac. (visiting site from above)
2. Open app, tap on VPN, tap on the "Profile For OpenVPN", and airdrop that to your MAC
3. open the dropped file on Mac with tunnelblick ...
4. follow directions. You may need to type in the password which is below the "Profile For OpenVPN button"
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One more question, if I may. When I start up the VPN on my laptop, I get a successful connection, but tunnelblick issues the following warning (I obfuscated the actual IP address, but it does match my cable modem IP):
This computer's apparent public IP address was not different after connecting to d2c7b_fishbone. It is still a.b.c.d.
This may mean that your VPN is not configured correctly.
Comments? Should I expect to see a different address at this point?
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George, if you are attaching anything, it is not showing. I'll try to predictively answer your question. The firewalla VPN server is inside of the Firewalla box. Its primary purpose is to protect you from the bad things when you are accessing the public wifi say from Starbucks or any other public wifi providers. There you will VPN back home and have the peace of mind.
So this is the reason whenever you are on VPN, you will be literally 'be at home'. So your public IP will always be your cable modem's IP address when you are on VPN.
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Thanks for the reply. I understand the basics of VPN. When I'm at a public hotspot, I'm making a certificate-secured private connection back to a VPN server - in this case my DDNS-visible firewalla. Thereafter, my communications is through that tunnel, to my home 'base', back and forth. I'm as secure as if I was surfing the web (or banking) from home. What appeared as a warning pop-up just kind of threw me a bit.
Since my home IP shows up, it would seem that any peer-to-peer traffic would also show the same IP and thus not be 'anonymous' in that sense?
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George, you got the VPN part perfectly. Firewalla VPN Server is not build to make you anonymous. It is there to encrypt traffic. For example, if an attacker is to sniff your traffic in Starbucks, he/she/it should only see a encrypt stream of traffic going from your phone to your home IP. And when the traffic comes back home, it will decrypt & exit, carry the same source IP as your home router. (as it appears you are at home part)
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I downloaded the tunnelblick but i'm having difficulties understanding how to proceed with the OpenVNP. I went to their site to download but it looks like they have different packages RedHat, Fedora etc... which one do we choose for mac os?
https://openvpn.net/index.php/download/58-open-source/downloads.html
Thank you!
H
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https://tunnelblick.net/downloads.html
This is the download
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