Connecting to a VPN from university?

I've set up an OpenVPN server with the aim of connecting to it while I am at university. This is obviously so I can hide my browsing history from the sysadmin there.

Has anybody done this before, and if so do they frown upon it?

Unless you're doing something that is particularly serious, by which I mean the likes of child porn, terrorism, that sort of thing rather than just streaming stuff and other things on that level, they probably don't care about what you do anyway.

Just use Tor if you want to hide traffic.

I suspect they probably will frown upon it because why do you need to hide your browsing history? They'll probably expect you're doing something bad because you don't naturally hide good things....

I don't personally know the answer, this is just an assumption...not many people invest in their own OpenVPN server so you know.

I use an app called ExpressVPN costs about £7/month, but is extremely reliable. I use this at school, due to sites being blocked and such, and after using it for a year, I haven't had any comments about using it - all they'll really see are the IP addresses that you are connecting to through your VPN and so unless they have alerts on VPN IP addresses, it shouldn't look dodgey.

Don't worry, it's nothing of that sort, more my own paranoia, heh.



Tor is very slow, and my aim isn't to hide traffic from the world - I don't mind my ISP at home seeing, I just don't want to be under the scrutiny of university sysadmins.



They won't be able to see the traffic; to a casual sysadmin's eye it would just resemble any HTTPS or SSH (etc.) encrypted traffic, only over a different port (UDP port 1194 to be precise). In other words, people hide their traffic all the time when they visit secure websites or send email over SSL, what I'm concerned about is whether or not the nonstandard port will be allowed.



That was the answer I was looking for, thanks. I was just concerned that maybe a university's internet access would be locked down in terms of which ports and protocols you can use. (It was at my sixth form college, to a massive degree.)

Yeh - with mine certain protocols don't work, but when I first set it up I played around with it until I got a connection that worked.

L2TP and PPTP don't work for me, but TCP with auto-detect proxies does, so if it doesnt work at first, just have a play around...

I mainly use it for using blocked sites, but also for more unethical reasons as well I suppose. (Nothing too bad though