Connecting to VPN

Step 1 - Obtain certificate

To connect to the servers of the group via wifi + VPN, you must first obtain a certificate to authenticate in the network.

To obtain it, you must:

• Go to this beautifully Czech page and click „Žádost o nový certifikát“:

• Scroll down and select CVUT:

• Log in with your Usermap account:

• Tick the magic box and press the magic button:

After that, accept the dialogues, and the certificate should be stored in your browser. You will also receive an email with the certificates.

Step 2 - Save it locally

Next you have to download the certificate from the browser to your local machine. There are several guides available:

• Old Firefox
• New Firefox: Go to the hamburger -> preferences -> search for "certificates" in the search bar -> View certificates..., and you should get to the picture below. Select all certificates from TERENA, and click Backup All...

After this step, you should have a file with the .p12 extension stored somewhere in your computer.

Step 3 - Obtain config files

You should ask one of the people at the lab to give you two files:

• chain.pem: Certificates to connect to the vpn
• vpn-faculty.conf: Configuration file for the vpn

Once you have those 3 files (the above + your .p12 certificate), you should edit lines 6 and 8 of vpn-faculty.conf so that they look like this:

# Path to certificate chain used to authenticate VPN server(s)
ca		         /some/path/to/chain.pem
# Path to user's private key and certificate, PKCS#12 file is expected here
pkcs12		        /some/path/to/<mycert>.p12

Step 4 - Connect!

Now you can connect to the VPN with the following command:

sudo openvpn path/to/vpn-faculty.conf

From here, you should leave the console running, and now you can ssh to you'r heart's desire.