VPN
Before getting started with EzIsland's VPN service, make sure you have read the disclaimer and have signed up for an EzIsland account.
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is one way to hide and secure your internet activity from your internet service provider such as Verizon, Spectrum or Comcast. The EzIsland VPN functions by connecting your computer to ezisland.org and forwarding all of your internet traffic to EzIsland before routing it to the destination. In order to keep things secure, the VPN will encrypt all traffic between your computer and EzIsland using your private encryption key.
EzIsland uses OpenVPN which is one particular open source implementation of VPN technology. To get started using a VPN, you will need an OpenVPN client as well as an OpenVPN configuration file. The OpenVPN configuration file contains your public and private encryption keys which are used both to authenticate you with the EzIsland server and to encrypt your VPN traffic. To download your OpenVPN configuration file log in and visit your account page. Once this file is downloaded and it will be named client.ovpn on your computer. Make sure you keep this file secret since it contains your VPN private key. Anyone with this private key can potentially impersonate your VPN account or intercept your VPN traffic.
Be aware that some EzIsland services might not work correctly if your device is simultaneously connected to a VPN. A VPN uses complicated networking technologies to reroute your internet traffic which can break VoIP SIP calls or Jabber/XMPP chat messaging. Additionally, you will likely need to restart the VPN whenever you move accross networks (such as between routers or cellular data) or if your device is put to sleep.
Below is a list of OpenVPN clients for various platforms. All these clients use the same VPN software under the hood, but differ in how you install them. In all cases, the client will ask for a VPN configuration file. You should supply it with your personal VPN configuration named client.ovpn that you downloaded from your account page. For mobile apps, you may need to email the configuration file to yourself in order to open it in the VPN app.
To test that your VPN is working, try visiting www.whatsmyip.org. The website will show you your public facing IP address. If your VPN is working properly the IP address should be the same as the EzIsland server, which is 172.104.208.46.
One OpenVPN client for MacOS is Tunnelblick. It can be installed using their website or through the command prompt using the homebrew package manager. After install homebrew you can then install Tunnelblick with the following command in the Terminal app:
Please be careful about copying and pasting commands into the command prompt. You should never execute a command you don't understand as the wrong command could seriously damage your computer.
OpenVPN is available for windows through OpenVPN's website. When you download the software you will actually be installing both the server and the client version of OpenVPN. The software will know wether to act as either the server or the client based on the configuration file you supply it. By supplying the application with the client.ovpn file that you downloaded, you are telling the software to act as a client and connect to EzIsland.
OpenVPN offers an app called OpenVPN Connect which is available for iPhone on the app store and for Android on the Google Play store. There is also an alternative client named OpenVPN for Android which is available via F-Droid, a softare repository for open source Android apps.
Most linux distributions offer the OpenVPN command line utility in their repositories. Due to the way linux manages DNS name resolution, linux users should append the following lines to their client.ovpn configuration file in order to ensure that DNS lookups are directed to the right place:
Running OpenVPN in linux generally requires administrator access and should be accomplished with the command:
Please be careful about copying and pasting commands into the command prompt. You should never execute a command you don't understand as the wrong command could seriously damage your computer. This is especially true if the command requests roots priveleges through the use of "sudo".
While a VPN can help you conceal your internet activity from your internet service provider, the extent to which it can conceal your identity from the websites you visit depends on how you use the VPN. If you access a website through the VPN that requires you to log in to an account, then you are revealing your identity to that website. By logging in, you are associating your current IP address to your account, and using a VPN will not change that.
For instance, many internet users now have a Google account. Whenever you access the Google search engine or one of Google's services (such as youtube or Gmail) you may be logged in to your account automatically even when using a VPN. This account can then be used to associate your internet search histroy with your identity. To truly conceal your identity from the websites you visit, you will need to log out of these accounts while using the VPN. To be extra safe, you may also want to clear your browser's cookies, which is data stored on the browser that is used to auto-login on many websites.
If you are particularly concerned about concealing your identity from the websites you visit, you should perhaps consider using the tor network instead of a VPN. Unlike a VPN, the tor network will forward your internet traffic through three randomly selected servers so that no single server has complete information about your internet traffic. The tor browser will also clear your cookies automatically so that you won't accidently autologin to websites.
Since the VPN works by masquerading your internet traffic as traffic originating from EzIsland, any consequences resulting from your internet activity will be attributed to EzIsland and its system administrator. For instance, if you attempt to access illegal websites or copyrighted material over the VPN, it will appear as if I am culpable. While I may be legally protected from the consequences of these actions since they can not be attributed to me beyond reasonable doubt, I am still responsible for ensuring that I do not enable such activity. In particular, my server hosting provider Linode reserves the right to terminate the EzIsland server if I cannot promptly respond to and mitigate illegal activity originating from EzIsland.
For this reason, I will not hesitate to revoke the account of any user who uses EzIsland for downloading copyrighted material or accessing illegal websites over the VPN. To this end, I have only permitted VPN traffic to particular port numbers while leaving nonstandard or common torrent ports closed. While torrenting has legitimate uses, it is often used to distributed copyrighted or illegal material and it can quickly use up network bandwith while potentially running without the user's awareness.