Shadowsocks for OpenVPN on Linux

Unable to surf the entire web because you're stuck behind a restrictive firewall? Then Shadowsocks might be your answer.

In this Linux guide, we'll walk you through the steps to use this proxy to connect to Mullvad's servers using the OpenVPN client.

App user? If you're using the Mullvad VPN app, try using Shadowsocks with the app.
 

What is Shadowsocks?

Please see our Intro to Shadowsocks guide.

Set-up instructions

1. Install OpenVPN

Follow our OpenVPN installation guide for Linux. Skip this step if you already have this set up.

2. Download Mullvad configuration file

1. Go to our configuration generator.
2. Use Linux as the platform and select a location. Click on Advanced settings and check Use IP addresses and Connect via bridges.
3. Download and extract the zip archive.

3. Install Shadowsocks

Run the command for your particular operating system.

Linux (Debian 9 / Ubuntu 16.10)

sudo apt-get install shadowsocks-libev

Linux (Debian 8 / Ubuntu 16.04)

sudo sh -c 'printf "deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jessie-backports.list'
sudo apt update
sudo apt -t jessie-backports install shadowsocks-libev

4. Run Shadowsocks

Open a Terminal window and run the following command, replacing xxx.xxx.xxx.xx with the IP address of the Mullvad bridge server you want to use as your entry location. To get the IP address you can ping the hostname, for example ping se-sto-br-001.mullvad.net.

ss-local -s xxx.xxx.xxx.xx -p 443 -l 1080 -k mullvad -m aes-256-gcm

5. Connect OpenVPN

In the Terminal, connect to OpenVPN with the bridge config file that you downloaded in step 2. Replace "mullvad_xx.conf" with the name of your file.

sudo openvpn --config /etc/openvpn/mullvad_xx.conf

6. Verify connection

To verify that you are connected and don't leak you can visit our check page.