OpenVPN Connection to Private Web Server

I have a personal project writing a work of fiction and I recently decided to update how I keep my notes. I used to just use Google Keep Notes because I could easily write down ideas on my phone. But it makes for terrible review of my notes when I’m actually writing the story and building the fictional world. I wanted something with better organization, but also something I could share with my writing group, and only my writing group. I don’t want to share it with the rest of the world until it is ready for publication.

So I decided to use the jekyll-rtd-theme to create a documentation website, then host it on a local web server, then set up a VPN connection so my writing group can view it.

The Website

Template Modifications

Hosting Locally

The VPN

I followed the instructions on Digital Ocean for this and I don’t think I can write better instructions than they. However, for the sake of demonstrating what I did and how my instance differed from their instructions, I will outline the main points of what I did.

Certificate Authority

• Install Easy-RSA on dedicated machine

• Set up PKI

• Create CA

(From Digital Ocean: How To Set Up and Configure a Certificate Authority (CA) On Ubuntu 20.04)

OpenVPN

• Install Easy-RSA on machine to host the OpenVPN server

• Create PKI

• Request server certificate and private key from CA

• Sign request

• Set up TLS obfuscation

• Generate OpenVPN client certificate key pair

• Configure OpenVPN server

(From Digital Ocean: How To Set Up and Configure an OpenVPN Server on Ubuntu 20.04)