Tools

We'll use several free tools during the setup process; OpenVPN + Easy-RSA are mandatory and the rest is very helpful.

Open VPN Community (free)

OpenVPN is an "SSL/TLS VPN" that is very mature and very widely used.

It can operate on any unused TCP or UDP port and can easily cross all kinds of firewalls and NAT-PAT routers, even in generally adverse situations like mobile devices.

OpenVPN now has commercial offers but we'll use the free Community edition for our "do it yourself" installation.

You can select and download the latest version (v2.4.7 as of this writing), corresponding to your own OS, here : https://openvpn.net/community-downloads/

Easy-RSA (free)

Easy-RSA is also managed by the OpenVPN team; it is the tool we'll use to create our PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) with its CA (Certificate Autority), to create and manage our Digital Certificates.

Easy-RSA 2 should already be included in OpenVPN Windows installers

If needed, here is the GitHub download location : https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa-old/releases

For Linux-like environments, you can also choose Easy-RSA 3; download from : https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa/releases

If you use Easy-RSA 3, check the docs as the commands have changed from Easy-RSA 2

Optional tools

CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3 (free version)

CBE for S3 is a very useful tool to transfer files between your own machine and your Amazon S3 buckets, with a familiar Windows Explorer -like GUI :

This tool has a free version and a commercial version; however, only the commercial version supports encrypted S3 buckets, so we'll do without encrypted buckets (at least at first).

You can grab the software here : https://www.cloudberrylab.com/explorer/amazon-s3.aspx

PuTTY (free)

This tool should not be generally required, but if you want to open a command line terminal to your Linux VPN server, then PuTTY is the way to go for the Windows platform.

PuTTY is available from : https://www.putty.org/

Your text editor of choice

Avoid the very basic Windows Notepad for its lack of customization options, no support for Unix-style "End-Of-Lines", etc. If you paste in Windows Notepad some file contents from these web pages, they will look like garbage...

ABSOLUTELY DON'T USE ANY MICROSOFT-WORD-LIKE "WORD PROCESSING" SOFTWARE !!!

Here are 3 very common good quality free text editors (initially created for developers, they support much more than simple text editing, but this is out of our scope) :