Tuesday, August 10, 2010

VPN introduced

Our institute recently banned facebook and other such sites in an effort to preserve bandwidth and although this was a very bad move we cannot do anything but find different ways to access the internet. There are web based proxy websites which fetch the page for you and then deliver them to your browser. They also allow the option of encoding the url so that administrators cannot monitor which site is being accessed. But these sites are really slow and unable to handle dynamic content effectively. So cgi proxies sites allow you to access facebook but it will not be able to load javascript or ajax content. Another solution is to use software such as PingFu, as explained before, which have developed their own set of proprietary protocols which encrypt data so that no one is able to 'read' it. 

The title is a bit misleading since this article is more about using third party software instead of complete understanding of VPN. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and was initially designed to allow remote users to become a part the office LAN keeping a few things in mind

1.Data confidentiality
2.Authentication support
3.Compatibility with huge range of devices


Data confidentiality is provided by using high grade encryption. VPN services are quite robust and can be employed on NAT devices as well. VPN servers can be installed on backbone routers as well to interconnect two different LAN's over the Internet.

Nowadays VPN connections also allow you to access high speed Internet through their fast connection to it. One such service is provided by SecurityKiss Tunnel software. It is a software which like PingFu bypasses firewalls by routing traffic to its servers, the difference being this software uses certain standards defined by VPN. To be able to run it you will also have to install OpenVpn as well. It is a foundation on which different companies build customised VPN products.

Simply install and run SecurityKiss with administrator privileges.Click on connect and you're done.Till now I have received seamless connectivity to various social networking sites like facebook.  Moreover torrent files were being downloaded at around 10kbps which is very impressive considering I did not have a premium account. They probably achieve this by using an efficient traffic compression scheme.


At present SecurityKiss provides 50mb per day limit to free users but there must be other similar services which provide better speed and download limit.Please leave a comment if you find/know any such vpn service.

NOTE: Remember to install openvpn and securitykiss with admin privileges.If there is a problem in connectivity try to run the software with admin privileges as well.

Few important links:

1. Wiki on VPN
2. OpenVpn
3. SecurityKiss Homepage
4. Learn more about PingFu

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