Rather than pay an additional monthly fee, I'd like to take advantage of the existing cloud computing resources I already have and host a VPN on Amazon or Linode, and access that from my MacBook while I'm on public wifi networks to encrypt my traffic. Are there any recommended solutions with a nice Mac client to optimize the experience?
Specifically, I just saw Cloak on Hacker News, and wondered if there was something similar I could set up myself.
OpenVPN appears to be one option with minimal licensing fees (free for single user use) and a Mac client. Anyone have any experience with it for personal VPN use?
Edit: I did come across this post that explains how to set up the l2tp vpnd service that ships with Snow Leopard, but haven't had a lot of luck getting it to work myself yet. A number of commenters on the post have succeeded though, so others reading this should give that a try.
On the client side, it looks like all you need to do is add a VPN network interface in System Preferences, so once the server is working, that part is pretty easy.
Best Answer
I do have my own OpenVPN server running on Linode, and I use Tunnelblick to connect to it. Works flawlessly.
There's a guide on Linode's library to help you set things up.