One fateful day, when I’d just got light in my fibre,
An email came my way. Snigger and giggle I did,
When I read what that email did bid,
And the button for trash did I smash.

Then a little while later, another damn mail on the wire!
Taken aback, I thought “ah frack,”
And conceded to put pause to my downloader.

Applying a little gumption,
I decided to heck with this setback!
Downloader now on resumption,
There’ll be no pesky watchers of my SYN-ACK!

“This is my tunnel,” Shrek whispered…

Look ma, I done a poetry!

Ahem… Such is the introductory tale of this script I’m sharing today. It might be useful to you if you happen to have a NordVPN subscription (I thought their two-year, $79 option was rather good value), and want to use it to have your Ubuntu system’s traffic freer of monitoring. In my case, I use it to launch the OpenVPN daemon on system start-up, connect to a randomly chosen NordVPN P2P server, and once the connection’s established it launches a transmission daemon. Should the VPN connection be terminated or fail, OpenVPN will stop the transmission daemon too. It’s a nice little way to wrap the whole thing up (but I guess that I would think so, wouldn’t I?).

Now that I’ve been using it successfully for a few months, I thought it’s time to share. I’ve gone and stuck it on my GitHub. As part of the upload exercise, I tried to make the script a little more customisable for others’ needs. Hopefully the readme and the script file are explanatory enough to help someone customise the thing for themselves. And if anyone’d like to suggest changes, well… clone away or whatever. And questions? Yeah them. Here. Or there. Wherever.