#Difference between stunnel and vpn mac os x
#Difference between stunnel and vpn windows

In theory, we should be running this on port 443 since (I’m hoping) the GFW expects SSL over that port. Regarding the choice of port number, I ‘randomly’ chose the port number from another tutorial about installing stunnel on CentOS. I tried using 127.0.0.1, but the OpenVPN client kept on failing to connect. (YOu can verify this by looking at the output of netstat -nlp|grep openvpn). The important thing to note here is that the IP address of the OpenVPN server needs to be specified – OpenVPN listens on a specific IP address. So I had to create a barebones conf file: cert = /etc/stunnel/stunnel.pem Create the conf filesįor some strange strange reason, Fedora doesn’t come with a set of default config files. This dumps the newly generated cert into the /etc/stunnel directory, where we’ll… 2. Openssl req -new -x509 -days 3650 -nodes -out /etc/stunnel/stunnel.pem -keyout /etc/stunnel/stunnel.pem Next, I setup stunnel on the server side: 1.

#Difference between stunnel and vpn mac os x

(My friend’s laptop is going to be a bit harder, since it’s running OS X, but rudix has a stunnel package, so I’m hoping it’s easier than having to install the Mac OS X dev tools and having to compile the stunnel code.)

#Difference between stunnel and vpn windows

Laptop was a tad more difficult – I had to get the Windows version from the stunnel site, and then install it. Server was easy – since I’m using Fedora, it was simply yum install stunnel, and it was done. The first thing to do was to get stunnel on both my server and laptop. Of course, performance is going to suffer, since we’re now triple layering TCP (first layer: stunnel, second layer: OpenVPN, third layer: the actual web browsing).īut that’s enough theory, onwards to the setup:

(Yay for packet inspection.) So, right now, I’m thinking use stunnel to wrap the OpenVPN packets in a pure SSL connection. My assumption is that the GFW is detecting the OpenVPN packets, since they’re not pure SSL, and then blocking the IP & port combination. Continuing my string of posts on trying to get OpenVPN working through China’s Great Firewall… and a recent (and unexpected but much appreciated) report that TCP & UDP ports are blocked quickly, I’m now looking at getting OpenVPN to work with stunnel.