In this video I walk through setting up your own self-hosted VPN on pfSense using OpenVPN. My main use case is simple: security when I’m traveling and forced onto public Wi‑Fi like hotels, airports, or coffee shops. A VPN gives you an encrypted tunnel so your traffic isn’t easy to capture and analyze on an open network, and it also makes your device look like it’s coming from your home connection. One big prerequisite I call out up front: you generally need a real public IP on your WAN—some ISPs hand out CGNAT addresses, but many will give you a public IP if you ask. I’m running pfSense 2.7.2 and I use the built-in OpenVPN wizard to create the CA, the server certificate, and the server instance (UDP over IPv4 on port 1194). I show the key options I care about, like picking a tunnel network that won’t collide with common home subnets, forcing all client traffic through the VPN (no leakage on public hotspots), and advertising my local LAN so I can reach home resources. After the wizard, I review the firewall rules it creates, add a local user with a user certificate, and install the OpenVPN Client Export package so exporting client configs is painless. Finally, I import the .ovpn into OpenVPN Connect on Android, verify my public IP shows as home, and confirm the session under Status > OpenVPN.