OpenVPN has been my goto appliance for SSL VPN connections for Devops accessing cloud services, especially as AWS doesn’t have its own SSL VPN gateway!
Open VPN provides a good UI and client tools. Until recently I’ve been happy to pay for its annual licence fee as it offered good value, but earlier this year they changed their model and increased their prices by 400% (oh wait thats before discount, its ONLY increased by 229%).
Last year an annual 10 user licence cost $180
This year my renewal is $720 reduced to $432 !
The application hasn’t changed. No new features, just a new licence key.
Which got me thinking, hang on, this is mostly availabile as open source. Okay no doubt the nice admin panel etc wont be part of it, but I rarely need that.
After a bit of searching I found this, and followed the steps.
A few hours later I had a fully working open VPN Server (open source) doing exactly the same, without the cost of the licence. Users had to be setup via CLI but it wasn’t that tricky.