Serrip
I am new to The world of VPN and so have been doing a fair bit of research to try and understand protocols and such.
One of the questions that I have is whether I would need to use TOR with OpenVPN?
I assumed that TOR was basically a VPN substitute, that it would mix and hide IPs, so would I need to use it if I had a VPN from a 3rd party online provider?
If so, what would be the benefits?
krzee
A vpn and tor are totally unrelated. they make no attempt to do or be the same thing.
A vpn is like taking a very long cable from the client and plugging it in to the server. the cable is virtual and is really an encrypted connection over the internet. A Vpn really only does 1 thing: it makes an encrypted connection between 2 endpoints. It is then up to the user what to do with the vpn. In your case that is routing the internet connection over the vpn, but for others it may be very different things.
TOR is a misattribution network, which uses multiple hops with MANY users passing traffic between random hops before it passes to the internet. TOR has one goal: to hide your location.
They do different things, it is up to you which you want to use.
Serrip
Thank you for your reply, I have since done research of my own into this to find out exactly what the two mean, on their own and to each other.
They can of course be used separately, but combined is even better, depending on what one would like to do as you say.
If I have a VPN connection and use Tor on it then I hide the fact that I'm using Tor at all from my ISP. If, using SOCKS5, I connect through Tor my VPN then I hide my IP from the VPN provider.
One of the other bonuses to running Tor over a VPN is that anybody listening on the VPN would only see Tor traffic exit.
