Pi-Hole and PiVPN on Google Compute Engine Free Tier with Full Tunnel and Split Tunnel OpenVPN Configurations
The goal of this guide is to enable you to safely and privately use the Internet on your phone without intrusive advertisements, and blocking your ISP, mobile carrier, or public Wi-Fi hotspot provider from gaining insight into your usage activity.
Run your own privacy-first ad blocking service within the Free Usage Tier on Google Cloud. This guide gets you set up with a Google Cloud account, and walks you through setting up a full tunnel (all traffic) or split tunnel (DNS traffic only) VPN connection on your Android Phone.
The benefit of a Split Tunnel VPN is that you can still interact with devices on your Local Network (such as Chromecast) and still have DNS based ad-blocking over an encrypted connection to the cloud.
| Tunnel Type | Data Usage | Security | Ad Blocking |
|---|---|---|---|
| full | 10% more data usage | 100% encryption | yes |
| split | least data usage | DNS encryption only | yes |
- Add instructions for full tunnel on iOS. Split Tunnel on iOS is not supported at this time.
- Add instructions for a full tunnel on Android.
It may take me another 24 to 48 hours from today (Dec 29, 2018) to get these things on the TO-DO List addressed. Help is welcome :-)
Go to https://cloud.google.com and click Console at the top right if you have previously used Google's Cloud Services, or click Try Free if it's your first time.
- Step 1 of 2
Agree to the terms and continue.
- Step 2 of 2
Set up a payments profile and continue
- Click the Hamburger Menu at the top left:
- Click Compute Engine:
- Select VM instances:
- Create a Project if you don't already have one:
- Enable billing for this Project if you haven't already:
- Compute Engine will begin initializing:
- Create a Virtual Machine instance on Compute Engine:
- Customize the instance:
- Name your Virtual Machine pi-hole.
Your Region selection should be any US region only (excluding Northern Virginia [us-east4]). I have used us-east1 and the us-east1-b zone because it is closest to me.
Choose a micro Machine Type in the dropdown.
Change the Boot Disk to be 30GB if you plan on keeping your DNS lookup records for any reason, otherwise the default 10GB disk allocation is adequate.
Allow HTTP traffic in the Firewall (add a checkmark).
Allow HTTPS traffic in the Firewall (add a checkmark).
- Expand Management, Security, disks, networking, sole tenancy and click the "Network" tab. Click the Pencil icon under "Network Interfaces".
- Reserve a Static Internal IP Address for your Primary Internal IP.
- The External IP Address should not be Ephemeral. Reserve a New Static IP Address
- You can log into your Virtual Machine via SSH in a Browser by clicking the SSH button. Make note of your External IP (it will be different from the screenshot below).
- Click the Hamburger Menu at the top left, click VPC Network and click Firewall Rules.
Click Create Firewall Rule at the top center of the page. The name of your rule should beallow-openvpn, change the Targets dropdown to All instances in the network. The Source IP Ranges should be0.0.0.0/0. The udp checkbox should be selected, and the port number next to it should be changed fromallto1194. Then click the Create button.
Once you log into your Virtual Machine via SSH, you want to update and upgrade it.
sudo su
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y
sudo su
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
You will flow into a series of prompts in a blue screen.
- Choose OK or answer positively for all the prompts until the "Select Protocols" question appears. IPv6 needs to be deselected as shown below:
Choose OK or answer positively for all the other prompts.
Set a strong password that you will remember for the Web Interface
pihole -a -p
-
Log into the web interface using the External IP that you noted down earlier at
http://your-external-ip/admin -
Click Settings, and navigate to DNS.
Set your Interface Listening Behavior to Listen on All Interfaces on this page:
-
Click the Save Button at the bottom of the page.
sudo su
curl -L https://install.pivpn.io | bash
You will flow into a series of prompts in a blue screen. All of the default values are appropriate. Choose OK or answer positively for all the prompts until you have to choose an upstream DNS provider. The default answer is Google. Choose Custom and set an IP Address of 10.8.0.1
The default answer to reboot is No at the end of the installer. It is fine to say No, we have a few more things to edit while we're logged in as root.
Get into the openvpn directory:
sudo su
cd /etc/openvpn
Edit server.conf. I prefer to use nano, so the command would be:
nano server.conf
Comment out the line which reads push "redirect-gateway def1" so it reads as follows:
# push "redirect-gateway def1"
The longer the keep-alive interval the longer it will take either end of the openvpn connection to detect whether the connection is no longer alive. Because mobile devices often lose connectivity and regain it, lower values are desirable.
Comment out keepalive 1800 3600 and add keepalive 10 60 below it, so it appears as follows:
# keepalive 1800 3600
keepalive 10 60
Comment out the line which reads cipher AES-256-CBC and add cipher AES-128-GCM below it, so it reads as follows:
# cipher AES-256-CBC
cipher AES-128-GCM
At the bottom of the file add the following lines:
# performance stuff
fast-io
compress lz4-v2
push "compress lz4-v2"
Press CTRL O to bring up the save prompt at the bottom of Nano, press Enter to save. Then press CTRL X to exit
To accept incoming OpenVPN connections over TCP on port 443:
sudo su
cd /etc/openvpn/
cp server.conf server_tcp443.conf
Edit server_tcp443.conf. I prefer to use nano, so the command would be:
nano server_tcp443.conf
Replace the proto udp and port 1194 lines with:
proto tcp
port 443
Edit the server 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0 line to reflect an IP address of 10.9.0.0, so it reads as follows:
server 10.9.0.0 255.255.255.0
Above the line push "dhcp-option DNS 10.8.0.1" add push "route 10.8.0.1" so it reads as follows:
push "route 10.8.0.1"
push "dhcp-option DNS 10.8.0.1"
Comment out keepalive 10 60 and add keepalive 10 120 below it, so it appears as follows:
# keepalive 1800 3600
keepalive 10 120
Comment out fast-io so it looks like this:
# fast-io
Press CTRL O to bring up the save prompt at the bottom of Nano, press Enter to save. Then press CTRL X to exit
Add the OpenVPN service on Port 443 by running this at the command prompt in your BASH shell:
systemctl enable openvpn@server_tcp443.service
Reboot the server with this shutdown command:
shutdown -r now
Connect to the Pi-Hole server and set up an OpenVPN Client Profile
pivpn add nopass
Give your client a name. I like to use an alphanumeric string composed of the user's first name, and their device's make and model (no spaces and no special characters).
This command will output a success message which looks like this:
========================================================
Done! mypixel3xl.ovpn successfully created!
mypixel3xl.ovpn was copied to:
/home/myusername/ovpns
for easy transfer. Please use this profile only on one
device and create additional profiles for other devices.
========================================================
To get the mypixel3xl.ovpn file to your phone it is easiest to maximize your SSH window and print the file to the terminal window, to copy & paste the output:
cat /home/myusername/ovpns/mypixel3xl.ovpn
Press CTRL - until the screen zooms out to a point where you can see the entire ovpn file printed on the screen. The first line will have the word client and the last line is </tls-crypt>. Highlighting this entire chunk with a mouse will cause a scissor icon to appear in the middle of your SSH window, this means this selection has been copied to your clipboard.
Paste this into your favorite Text Editor and save the file with an .ovpn extension.
Around Line 12, edit the line which reads cipher AES-256-CBC and change it to read:
cipher AES-128-GCM
E-mail the file to yourself, upload in Google Drive, or use whatever secure method you prefer to transfer this file to your phone. This file can be downloaded to your phone.
When the app opens you are in the Profiles Tab.
-
Import your Profile, click the
+at the top right. -
Then click Import at the bottom left of the modal that appears.
-
Click the Hamburger Menu at the top left to choose Google Drive, or your Downloads folder, depending on what method you used to get the .ovpn file to your phone.
-
Click the pencil icon next to the VPN profile you imported.
- Click the Routing Tab.
- Click Excluded Networks under IPv4 and add this:
10.0.0.8/8 172.16.0.0/12 192.168.0.0/16 - Bypass VPN for local networks should NOT have a checkmark. Uncheck it.
- Under the Authentication/Encryption Tab
- The Encryption Cipher should be
AES-128-GCM
- The Encryption Cipher should be
- Under the Allowed Apps Tab
- the Drive, Duo, Gmail, Google Play Store, Phone, Phone and Messaging Storage and Phone Services apps should have a checkmark.
- Click Excluded Networks under IPv4 and add this:
- Click the Routing Tab.
-
Click the back button a couple times until you are at the Profiles Tab again.
Click the Settings Tab:
- OpenVPN 3 Core should have a checkmark
- click Default VPN and choose the VPN you have imported
- Connect on Boot should have a checkmark
Click the back button a couple times until you are at the Profiles Tab again.
- Clicking the name of the VPN profile you imported should trigger a connection.
This is a work in progress. Full Tunnel VPN instructions will be coming soon.
Go here: https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+my+ip
You will see your IP address displayed very prominently at the top above the label: Your public IP address
If you see anything other than the External IP Address of your Google Compute Engine Virtual Machine, then you do not have a Full Tunnel VPN.
If you see an IPv6 address while connected to the VPN, then you have a big problem.
You can do some further troubleshooting by visiting: https://www.whatismyip.com
If you see no IPv4 address, and a public IPv6 address identical to the one from the Google search result earlier, it means your tunnel is not processing any IPv4 traffic, and you are going out to the Internet over IPv6 directly.
This typically means you have a problem with your server configuration and client configuration files.
If DNS lookups are not happening exclusively over the VPN connection to the Pi-Hole server, then you have a DNS leak. A DNS leak will result in ads appearing.
In the Pi-Hole Web Interface at http://your-external-ip/admin/settings.php?tab=dns choose just one DNS provider. The two Google IPv4 DNS servers will give you the highest performance. For our test, we will deselect the Google IPv4 DNS servers and choose the 2 Cloudflare DNS servers.
On your device, go to https://www.dnsleaktest.com/ and click the Extended test button. On the table in the next page, every single row must say "Cloudflare". If you see any IPs that do not belong to Cloudflare, you have a DNS leak. This typically means you have a problem with your server configuration and client configuration files.
Turn your VPN off and try the Extended test again, you will see your default DNS servers as defined by your Internet provider or your Router.
If there is something that can be done better, or if this documentation can be improved in any way, please submit a Pull Request with your fixes or edits. Discussions regarding Issues are welcome as well.
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