A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a connection method used to add security and privacy to private and public networks, like WiFi Hotspots and the Internet. VPN’s are most often used by corporations to protect sensitive data, or by ordinary web users in parts of the world where there are government restrictions on internet content. Privacy is increased with a Virtual Private Network because the user’s initial IP address is replaced with one from the Virtual Private Network provider. PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) is a VPN protocol that’s used to ensure proper communications between a VPN client and a VPN server, also available for CentOS Linux. This is a free and open source (community-supported) enterprise operating system, compatible with its upstream source Red Hat Enterprise Linux, from the CentOS Project. In this article we will describe how to set up a PPTP VPN on Centos 8.
- How to set up a PPTP VPN on CentOS 8:
Step 1: Install pptpd
Use the following commands:
Step 2: Setup your pptpd
Edit IP setttings in: /etc/pptpd.conf :
Edit the following settings to /etc/ppp/options.pptpd:
Step 3: Create user to access the VPN server
Add user account in/etc/ppp/chap-secrets (assign username and password):
Step 4: Enable network forwarding in /etc/sysctl.conf
Step 5: Setup ”iptables”
You need to add the following iptables rules in order to open the correct ports and properly forward the data packets:
Step 6: Start VPN server
You have successfully installed PPTP VPN on your CentOS!
