Big news this week, as the Republicans in Congress decided to scrap an FCC rule known as the Broadband Consumer Privacy Proposal which required broadband providers to get permission from subscribers before collecting and selling data collected about their users.
Since I am very interested in my online privacy, or at least, I like to have the option to choose when to share my information for myself, and since I recently upgraded my home router to a Unifi Security Gateway from Ubiquiti Networks, I wanted to know if the VPN client would be compatible with the Private Internet Access VPN that I use to protect my privacy, thereby putting my entire house behind the VPN all the time.
Posts in the UBNT Community Forums seem to have a lot of confusion, or are just outdated.
It turns out the setup for a PIA VPN configuration is very easy.
The only thing that posed any challenge was calculating all the routes for all the subnets outside my house, to route that traffic over the VPN. In my case, since I use RFC1918 space, here is the list of routes I needed to add to the USG, via the "subnets" menu item in the USG settings app:
- 0.0.0.0/1
- 192.169.0.0/16
- 192.170.0.0/15
- 192.172.0.0/14
- 192.176.0.0/12
- 193.0.0.0/8
- 194.0.0.0/7
- 196.0.0.0/6
- 200.0.0.0/5
- 208.0.0.0/4
- 224.0.0.0/3
- Purpose: VPN Client
- VPN Client: PPTP
- Enabled: check this when you want the VPN to go live
- Remote Subnets: one entry for each of the subnets in the list above (modified for your own use, if you don't use 192.168.x.x in your house/business)
- Server IP: get this from PIA, I used `nslookup us-east.privateinternetaccess.com`
- Username: your PIA username
- Password: your PIA password
- MPPE: Yes. You definitely want to have your VPN connection encrypted.
Enjoy your ISP not selling your internet activities to advertisers.