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I've recently purchased a VPN from vpntunnel.se and was wondering if it was possible to use it for specific applications (Firefox, xchat etc)

Also i'm having a little trouble setting up the the VPN in Gnome's Network-manager, I have the network-manager-openvpn package installed but it keeps complaining about "no secrets"?

I can connect fine with the console client and the GUI KVpnc

Thanks

1 Answer 1

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You can, but it's complicated.

Keeping it brief, the way I'd do it would be to run a SOCKS proxy on the local machine, and configure it to push traffic out down the VPN interface. You then configure each of your applications you want to push traffic down the VPN to use the SOCKS proxy. If they don't support SOCKS, of course, then you're out of luck.

On the other hand, if the applications you're using only need to run traffic down the VPN to certain locations, you could modify the routing table on your machine to route traffic to those locations through the VPN interface.

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  • Thanks for the response. Do you have any recommendations for SOCKS proxy software?
    – hipyhop
    Feb 27, 2011 at 17:21
  • Also, SOCKS assumes SOCKS compliant software. Try to proxy SSH through SOCKS. Or Samba traffic.
    – Olli
    Feb 27, 2011 at 17:25
  • @Olli: I never said it was a perfect solution; note my caveat about software that doesn't support SOCKS. Personally, my preference would be on modifying your routing table. @hipyhop: OpenSSH can act as a SOCKS proxy, assuming you have a host at the other end of the VPN you can connect to. I'm not familiar with any other SOCKS proxies except OpenSSH, sorry. Feb 27, 2011 at 23:29
  • HMM i have a webserver running OpenSSH that i could use for this, Is it possible whilst still running it as a web server? Thanks again
    – hipyhop
    Mar 1, 2011 at 8:52

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