There has been a lot of talk about why you should use a VPN on public networks and why it shouldn’t be a commercial one. I am a huge fan of  the Streisand privacy stack because it includes and  L2TP/IPsec VPN, OpenConnect, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Shadowsocks, sslh, Stunnel, and a Tor bridge all in one amazing package. The problem with Streisand though is the install is amazingly complicated using  ansible from your local system to a cloud provider using API calls and if you are not in a shop that uses this technology it can be difficult to get working correctly so I have hacked the install simplified the install to install it directly on a digitalocean server (but this should work everywhere). The steps are as follows: Create a new  digitalocean Ubuntu 14.04 droplet named streisand with your SSH key. The $5 droplet “works” but if you are not going to keep it running all the time (I wouldnt) I would spin this up on a $20 a month droplet when needed (say for a trip out of the country or to blackhat). Run the following commands to install the prerequisites: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y git python-paramiko python-pip python-pycurl python-dev build-essential sudo pip install ansible … Continue reading The VPN You Should Be Using