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Self-hosted Pritunl VPN server with MFA

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Article from ADMIN 86/2025

By Conor Fitzgerald

We give you the ultimate guide to deploying a self-hosted Pritunl VPN server with multifactor authentication.

A virtual private network (VPN) can typically be described as a solution that allows an encrypted secure connection, often referred to as a tunnel, to be established to a private network. Many people associate a VPN with remote working, whereby an employee would establish a VPN connection to their corporate network (e.g., from their home office), allowing them to access resources such as file shares, intranet sites, and internal applications securely.

Although the prevalence of cloud solutions have certainly reduced the need for VPNs, deploying a VPN solution can be considered for many other reasons. In addition to secure remote access, VPN solutions offer enhanced security on free public WiFi, and they can also circumvent geo-restricted content by routing all Internet traffic over the VPN tunnel. Furthermore, a VPN can be used by an organization to provide site-to-site connectivity between remote offices, thus allowing that organization to share resources while giving the end users the convenience of being on the same logical network.

Although many commercial VPN solutions are on the market, several open source self-hosted alternatives are available, and one of the best open source VPN solutions to deploy across your corporate or home network is Pritunl.

The benefits of a Pritunl VPN include:

Open Source – Pritunl is free to use with no set limit on the number of users.
Secure – Pritunl uses strong encryption protocols and supports multifactor authentication (MFA).
Scalable – Pritunl can be deployed to handle a large number of VPN users at any one time.
Ease of Use – Pritunl is a user-friendly VPN solution.
Multiple Use Cases – Pritunl provides secure remote access along with site-to-site connectivity to establish VPN connectivity between multiple office locations.

In this article, I show you how to deploy a single-instance Pritunl VPN server running Ubuntu 24.04.01

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