This is not the first time that I’m talking about the BolehVPN service, but this time I’ll focus mainly on the easy-to-use client application.

BolehVPN is a VPN service established in 2007 and it has grown into one of the most important VPN providers in South-Est Asia. With servers in the USA, UK, Canada, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, BolehVPN specializes in P2P and BitTorrent privacy and anonymity.

BolehVPN Windows Client GUI

BolehVPN has recently launched an easy-to-use client application that saves users from manual settings and other “not so pleasant” advanced configs. I’m going to shortly present the newly launched client app.

After you get the BolehVPN account, go to the Windows Installation tutorial and get the client app. After the installation, you need to run the application with administrative rights (All Programs > BolehVPN > BolehVPN right-click and select Run as Administrator).

Enter the username and password you received upon registration. The configuration files will be downloaded and you will be ready to go. Choose the server location and press Connect.

Nice and smooth VPN connect. After playing with the client app for a while, here are are several things that I really liked:

• It’s a one-click Windows application. No unneeded features.
• It offers easy access to different server configurations: proxied, fully-routed, surfing/streaming, tcp443 (take a look on this page for more details).
• The speed of VPN servers is impressive (up to 10 Mbits download for streaming config).
• It shows the in and out traffic through the VPN servers.

BolehVPN Supports BT Torrent and Bypasses P2P Traffic Shaping

BolehVPN provides a service to bypass your internet throttle – allowing you to download torrents at max speeds, protect your surfing privacy, and bypass websites censored by your ISP.

This is very useful due to the fact that many of the ISP (Internet service provider) around the world are using hardware and software tools for traffic shaping, in order to detect, regulate and throttle torrent/p2p traffic.

Most VPN service providers do not accept P2P traffic, but BolehVPN does. The Malaysian VPN service not only provides standard features of most VPN services, such as hiding your real IP address and bypassing censorship but also encrypts your data connection preventing ISPs from snooping what you are downloading or performing traffic analysis or p2p throttling.

BolehVPN Servers and Packages

BolehVPN has servers that located in United States, UK, Canada, Luxembourg, and Sweden. The US server is for surfing and streaming only. The connections are established via OpenVPN.

The pricing of BolehVPN is:

• 3 days trial – $1.8
• 7 days trial – $3.3
• 1 month – $10
• 6 months – $41.5
• 1 year – $78

This post presents my experience on installing BolehVPN on an Ubuntu Linux computer.

Since the BolehVPN giveaway that How-To-Hide-Ip made lately has seen a lot of success, we thought we’d continue getting into more details into that VPN service. A review, as well as the Windows platform installation, have already been written here (hey, by the way, in case you are wondering, the ten people who won the giveaway have been announced on that same article).

So why don’t we consider another platform for installing it? Since Ubuntu is one of the popular Linux distribution out there (and since this is the one I am using), I thought I could take you through the installation process. So for your reference purposes, I am using the 32bit version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (aka precise), on an Intel-based laptop.

For this article, I have uninstalled the OpenVPN package, but for your case, it may be that this package is already installed.

Pre-requisites – Install OpenVPN

So let’s first install the OpenVPN package:

heryzo@xxxxx:~$ sudo apt-get install openvpn

Personally, I like configuring all network-related tasks via the network-manager. So, I like taking the following extra-step (which is not mandatory, but quite useful). For that purpose, we need to install the package “network-manager-openvpn.” You can do that via the following command:

heryzo@xxxx:~$ sudo apt-get install network-manager-openvpn

Download BolehVPN Ubuntu activation keys

Then let’s download the activation keys for BolehVPN. You can find it from your BolehVPN dashboard once you’ve purchased a package. This process will have you download a zip file containing different configurations.

For this example, I’ve chosen to use the Canada landing point for my VPN connection, though I issued the following command.

So let’s first copy all the files that have been downloaded to /etc/openvpn

heryzo@xxxx:/etc/openvpn$ sudo cp /home/heryzo/Downloads/bolehvpn/hidemyip/* .

heryzo@xxxx:/etc/openvpn$ sudo cp /home/heryzo/Downloads/bolehvpn/hidemyip/FullyRouted-Canada.ovpn hidemyip.conf

Be careful with this last step: the official documentation on BolehVPN says to rename the file to openvpn.conf. However, I’ve found some mismatch since the keys that I downloaded from the same BolehVPN named my certificate files into hidemyip.crt and hidemyip.key. It took me some minutes figuring out what was wrong with my settings. Until I found out that I had to rename the conf file similar to the key files, though the use of hidemyip.conf instead of openvpn.con

Start the OpenVPN service

Now let’s start the OpenVPN service by issuing the following command:

heryzo@xxxx:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/openvpn start

* Starting virtual private network daemon(s)… * Autostarting VPN ‘hidemyip’

Note that shell command mentions that it automatically started the “hidemyip” VPN tunnel.

BolehVPN Ubuntu – All set!

Then we’re all set. Let’s check if whatismyipaddress.com finds out that I’m no more in Madagascar – and preferably, let’s hope it finds that I am somewhere in Canada.

So here’s the screenshot.

It seems like we’re all set. Let’s try one of those favorite websites that don’t allow guys located in places like mine to surf on. Hulu, are you going to remind me again that your service is not available in my country? Let’s see.

So I could load one of the most popular movies on Hulu today – I chose “Master Chef” since I like cooking shows I’d better stop this streaming session with Master Chef. Otherwise, I’ll end up watching the whole episode- which is not the goal …

Conclusion

Anyway, I hope this little “how-to” would have helped Linux users have their BolehVPN connection all-setup. I’ve mentioned a little trick that, I’m pretty sure, some Linux users would have blocked them to get it going. Enjoy!