For a couple of days I was looking for an extremely cheap vps provider on websites like lowendtalk .Having a vpn handy is really useful especially when using an network.After going through a lot of the providers and their infrastructure, I landing on host1plus.

Host1Plus is an extreme cheap VPS provider where the hosting starting from 2$ and goes up depending on the hardware specs you select.For a standard VPS with about 3-4 concurrent users a 256 MB ram computer is sufficient enough.Setting up this vpn was really easy all i had to do was install the pptpd package from the ubuntu repository.After some minor configuration changes I was up and running with a VPN that works and routes all my traffic though it.

The vpn was working fine for a couple of days until one day i could not connect to it.Seems like there was an issue with the host1plus network configuration due to which i was not able to reach my server.So i logged onto the admin dashboard and reinstalled the OS with their oneclick reinstall button.I had to go through the same process as before to setup the users , iptables ……

I had been playing around with chef for a couple of months now.So I though making a chef cookbook to install pptp and configure would make the setup really easy.Just running one command with smart default was the primary goal of this cookbook.

So I wrote a cookbook which is available on github.To use the cookbook you need chef installed.And you need to add the pptpd recipe to the node.json file.

Other details on how to use the cookbook is available on README.

Writing the cookbook was easy given chef has a very clean and neatly defined DSL to perform actions on the server.