basic concept about VPN . asked by newbie

K

kenny1999

Member
hi

I ve been hearing about VPN but never tried it. I always want to have some levels of privacy especially having activities in Chinese websites. (I am Chinese living out of China)

I'd like to clear up myself with some basic concepts.

1. Does VPN basically mean visiting a website with a different IP from the one I am actually sitting home typing with my computer? For example, I am actually in Japan and when I visit a site, it is possible that the site will think I am from Russia or Europe or any countries else? Does VPN mean that?

2. Except government involvement or request to the VPN service provider (for example, when it comes to criminal activities), when I am accessing through VPN, would it be possible that the site I want to hide myself from be able to find out my real location / country? If it is, how easy would that be?

Any help, answers, advice are appreciated. Thank you.
 
beers

beers

Moderator
Staff member
Here's pretty much the basic concepts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_server

A VPN in your case differs slightly from just a proxy as you would have an encrypted tunnel from you to the VPN endpoint. Remote sites see your traffic as originating from the remote side of the VPN.
 
Gun

Gun

Member
kenny1999 said:
hi

I ve been hearing about VPN but never tried it. I always want to have some levels of privacy especially having activities in Chinese websites. (I am Chinese living out of China)

I'd like to clear up myself with some basic concepts.

1. Does VPN basically mean visiting a website with a different IP from the one I am actually sitting home typing with my computer? For example, I am actually in Japan and when I visit a site, it is possible that the site will think I am from Russia or Europe or any countries else? Does VPN mean that?

2. Except government involvement or request to the VPN service provider (for example, when it comes to criminal activities), when I am accessing through VPN, would it be possible that the site I want to hide myself from be able to find out my real location / country? If it is, how easy would that be?

Any help, answers, advice are appreciated. Thank you.
Click to expand...

You're right, from my understanding a VPN basically takes your connection and runs it through several proxies. With most VPNs you can choose the location you wish to appear as. So if you were Japanese you could choose to use a USA proxy, English proxy, etc.

When you're using a VPN the site would just see you coming from whichever country your VPN is from (Again, you can usually choose which country that is). I believe it's pretty hard, if not impossible to track someone if they're using a VPN.
 
P

PabloTeK

Active Member
VPNs are basically a way of extending a local network across the internet privately (hence the name "Virtual Private Network"). There are two types of VPN:

  1. Split tunnel - only certain destinations are sent over the VPN
  2. Full tunnel - all traffic is sent over the VPN

Answers:

1. If the destination you're connecting to is set to go down to the VPN (as it sounds like a full tunnel VPN, this will likely be everything), then the apparent IP will be of the other end in this case. If your IP was 1.1.1.1 and the VPN endpoint was 1.1.1.2, your IP would appear to be 1.1.1.2.

2. Same answer as above, as the other end of the VPN will be the IP that is exposed to the internet, the Geo IP information for that IP can be found, but not yours!
 
G

Gargamel

New Member
with the VPN your computer appears to outsiders to be using the VPN server's IP. Hidemyass is one of those services out there offering this on a large scale.
Theoretically it is questionable whether your real IP can be figured out or not. At the very least the VPN server needs to know how to forward the correct packets back to you. I'm not sure if hackers have a way of finding out your real IP, could be they do... they may be some 'weaknesses' in the VPN system that may allow the original IP to leak out somehow; everything's possible
 
Geoff

Geoff

VIP Member
Gun said:
You're right, from my understanding a VPN basically takes your connection and runs it through several proxies. With most VPNs you can choose the location you wish to appear as. So if you were Japanese you could choose to use a USA proxy, English proxy, etc.

When you're using a VPN the site would just see you coming from whichever country your VPN is from (Again, you can usually choose which country that is). I believe it's pretty hard, if not impossible to track someone if they're using a VPN.
Click to expand...
Not exactly.

A VPN is a way of extending a LAN over the internet. Say you have two remote offices in different locations, if having a direct fiber link between the two is not an option, they can choose to setup a VPN connection that is a private tunnel through the "cloud", so users can work and it will act just as if they are on-site. They have access to local resources like network share points, servers, etc.

VPNs are also used by people who want secure connections on public or unsecure networks, or who want to access services not available in their country based on IP. The common misconception is that being on a VPN isn't the end-all for security, it encrypts the connection between your device and the end of the VPN tunnel, but it's not necessarily secure between the end of the VPN tunnel and your final destination such as the web. It's really used more for security on unsecure networks where users are worried about someone on that local network seeing what they are doing.

As Pablo said, there are two main types of VPN connections. In full tunnel mode, all traffic is sent over the VPN, such as web traffic. In split tunnel mode, only traffic that is destined for the remote site is sent over the VPN, so an example would be normal web traffic would be sent over the local network, and connections to the remote file server are sent over the VPN. Using a full tunnel mode VPN, your internet performance is reduced as all traffic has to go from your device, to the remote VPN, then out to the end point, instead of your device to the end point. Upload speeds are typically the killer, as you want to make sure the upload speed where the VPN is being hosted can support at least your full download speed to minimize the performance impact.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top