PPTP VPN

I’m a big fan of OpenVPN - I use it to tunnel traffic between my home net and the office. I also have an OpenVPN set with a customer site. Since I recently flushed an Android update and rooted the device at the same time I thought about installing OpenVPN on the Android. Searching for “openvpn” in the market comes up with a few search results but investigating a bit more into the use of OpenVPN on an Android is not very encouraging.

So I had a look at a different approach: Android by default allows to create a VPN via PPTP. On the Gentoo forums someone already did an excellent HOWTO on setting up a PPTP server on Gentoo. I tried it and it worked like a charm. The only little annoyance on the Android side is that the name server is lost as soon as I turn on the VPN. I need to dig deeper into the config to see if this is something that can be turned off in the pppd.

As an added bonus, the PPTP setup also works with my wife’s iPhone :-)