Manual PIA VPN Connections for FreeNAS Jails

Setting up manual VPN connections to Private Internet Access can be a little confusing. This repo contains a single script to setup a Wireguard connection to PIA quickly.

Usage

Usage:
  ./pia-wg.sh setup    - Create configuration files
  ./pia-wg.sh token    - Fetch an auth token with user/password
  ./pia-wg.sh pf_set   - setup port forwarding
  ./pia-wg.sh pf_clean - clean up portforwarding data
  ./pia-wg.sh pf_port  - last known port forwarding port

Quickstart

Download pia-wg.sh into your jail
Run pia-wg.sh setup. Automatically find the fastest region, exchange wireguard keys and create a wireguard configuration.
Copy pia.conf to /usr/local/etc/wireguard
Start your VPN connection
Done!

It looks like this:

# check your current IP
> curl icanhazip.com

# fetch the script into your FreeNAS jail
> curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mostlygeek/pia-wg/main/pia-wg.sh
> chmod +x pia-wg.sh

# Setup and create configuration files
> ./pia-wg.sh setup
Please enter basic information
  PIA Username: pXXXXXXX
  PIA Password:
  Use portfowarding? [true]: true
Getting the server list... OK!
CA Toronto: 0.006924s
Panama (geo): 0.043789s

#
# two files will be created.  .settings.env, pia.conf

> cp pia.conf /usr/local/etc/wireguard/pia.conf
> wg-quick up pia
> curl icanhazip.com

Using Port forwarding

When running pia-wg.sh setup make sure use true when asked about port-forwarding.

PIA port forwarding generally works like this.

Through an established VPN connection ...
Call the REST API on the wireguard server to request a port forward
Keep port forwarding active with a keep alive request at least every 15 minutes

There are three commands to make this easier:

pia-wg.sh pf_set
pia-wg.sh pf_clean
pia-wg.sh pf_port

Usage example:

# initial run creates a new .portforward.env
> ./pia-wg.sh pf_set
File: .portforward.env not found.  Creating a new one.
  - Fetching token from metaserver host ... Success!
  - Fetching payload/signature values from 10.44.128.1 ... Success!
  - Wrote new .portforward.env
  - Binding/Refreshing binding on port:49658 ... Success!


# ./pia-wg.sh pf_set again uses the cached values
# to keep the port forward alive.  This can be automated via a cronjob.

> ./pia-wg.sh pf_set
Loading cached settings from .portforward.env
  - Binding/Refreshing binding on port:49658 ... Success!

# the last known port can be printed with:
> ./pia-wg.sh pf_port
49658

# it can be used like this ...
> update-something.sh $(./pia-wg.sh pf_port)

Port Forwarding Expiry

The port forwarding allocation expires every two months. This means every few months the configuration needs to be redone. This can be done like this:

# clean up the old settings
> ./pia-wg.sh pf_clean

# set up port forwarding again
> ./pia_wg.sh pf_set

This can be automated with a cronjob that runs ./pia-wg.sh pf_clean every few weeks. On the next run of ./pia-wg.sh pf_set it will automatically create a new configuration file and set the port.

Original Repo

Some of the code in this repo was adapted from PIA's official repo, pia-foss/manual-connections. That code is less FreeBSD specific and organized differently. I wanted a single script file that was easy to fetch and could run without any tweaks.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT (Expat) license, which can be found here.