New subject: IP Bill, BitFolk, and VPNs

21 Nov 2016

On Mon, November 21, 2016 12:20, Mike Zanker wrote:
...
  On 21 Nov 2016, at 11:49, Chris Dennis
&lt;cgdennis(a)btinternet.com&gt; wrote:

> Here's a question: is BitFolk an 'ISP' for the purposes of the bill?  --
> does it collect metadata about traffic in and out of my VPS?
>
> If not, would it make sense to use my BitFolk VPS as a VPN, so that it
> proxies my home internet connection?  I've been toying with the idea of
> using software such as OpenVPN for this, and the bill (very nearly an
> Act now) gives me another reason for getting on with it. <snip>
...
  I must admit that I've been thinking along the
same lines, although my
 ISP (Andrews & Arnold) is vehemently opposed to the bill and is making
 their own plans. I think the IP Bill allows for DPI of the backhauls,
 though, so the monitoring and logging could be done before your packets
 even get to your ISP, hence the need for VPN. 
I'd been thinking of setting up a VPN to my Bitfolk box for a while (but
had trouble getting it set up then configured my home router to provide
one instead).

Originally my reason was in order to bypass restrictions on our Eduroam
network (for instance I really wanted to SSH to a non-standard port on my
server rather than having to open port 22 to the whole IP range used by
our University), but now I'm unhappy about letting the state decide what
is or is not suitable for me to view (and the slippery slope that
represents), so the answer to this would be interesting for me too.

...
  I'm not sure what the throughput would be on our
VPS, though - it's
 pretty CPU-intensive. Would it be likely to cause issues to the hosting
 servers? 
I hadn't considered that.  Is a single user VPN more CPU intensive than
I'd imagine?

Gavin

Re: [bitfolk] IP Bill, BitFolk, and VPNs