How to install a PPTPD VPN server on Centos 6.X in just 4 commands

First off, a big special thanks goes out to “Drew Moris” for the script we will use today. You can view the original post on his website for this script here: http://drewsymo.com/2013/11/how-to-install-pptp-vpn-server-on-centos-6-x/

Today we’re going to install a PPTPD VPN Server in just a few commands – Setting up a PPTPD server can be a little fiddly and can sometimes be tricky, however thanks to a bit of ingenuity of Drew’s, we can knock over a fully working installation of PPTPD in just a few moves, let’s get started!

What you will need to do this tutorial:

1. A VPS or Dedicated server that is running CentOS 6.x, don’t worry this script is architecture independent, x86 or 64 will be fine.
2. About 5 minutes of time and an already primed session of Putty ready to go
3. OpenVZ users only: There is always that one special kid in the class isn’t there? You will need to do 2 more things which are:
   1. Please make sure you enable both TUN/TAP and PPP in your VPN Control Panel
   2. There is an extra IPTables rule you will need to add that is at the end of this tutorial, please make sure you do!

Need a VPS? I highly recommend DigitalOcean if you are shopping around, pretty quick support and their entire website is perfectly automated. It’s a very impressive place to hang out!

Okay, let’s begin!

In your ready to go putty session run the following commands:

yum install -y git
cd /opt && git clone git://github.com/drewsymo/VPN.git
cd VPN && bash vpn-setup-vanilla.sh

OpenVZ Users (One last thing)

You need to also run an additional command for IPTables so your data is routed correctly:

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j SNAT --to-source x.x.x.x

Just replace the x.x.x.x with the IP address of your venet0 IP.

Final Thoughts

The best test to perform after a script job is to make sure that if the server reboots that everything comes back online automatically and without you having to do anything to help it.

As great as this script from Drew is, a security concern is that you’re blindly installing a script from the internet that may have been altered maliciously since Drew made it or I wrote about it (without anyone knowing of course). So I wouldn’t recommend this as a script to use in a serious application, unless you download it yourself first and eyeball it from beginning to end. However if you’re just doing this for fun or research and you’re not a hacker, filthy rich or Julian Assange then you should be pretty fine using it however you wish! 🙂

Enjoy!

Xavier.