What You Need
To follow along with today’s tutorial, you only need a few things. Obviously you need a Fire tablet but you also need a VPN of some sort—if you’ve heard about VPNs (and that they’re good for privacy) but you’re not really sure about them, be sure to check out our guide to what a VPN is and why you might want to use one. While you’re at it, we also have some great recommendations for VPN providers with tips on how to pick one that best fits your needs.
RELATED: What Is a VPN, and Why Would I Need One?
Because each VPN provider has its own settings (server addresses, etc.) it’s important that you take a moment to review the help files for your VPN provider of course (or the information your workplace sent you on the matter) as you’ll need the specific information for your specific VPN later in the tutorial.
Configuring and Activating the VPN
Armed with your VPN’s info, entering the VPN is a straightforward affair. On your Fire tablet, swipe down from the notification bar and click on the “Settings” icon.
Within the Settings menu, select “Wireless & VPN”.
In turn, select “VPN”.
Within the VPN menu, click on the plus sign “+” located in the upper right corner to create a new VPN entry.
Here is where the information from your VPN provider, workplace, or school is critical. Give your VPN connection a name (e.g. University Network or StrongVPN) and then select the appropriate type from the dropdown menu. Enter the information provided by your VPN and click “Save”.
After you save the entry, you’ll see the new VPN listed. Click on the link icon, seen below.
You’ll be prompted for your username and password credentials. Enter them and click “Connect”.
If the setup is correct, you’ll immediately see a key icon in the notification bar.
At this point, you’re connected to the VPN. Let’s look at how to test the connection (to ensure your data is actually routing through the VPN) and how to disconnect from it.
Testing (and Disconnecting from) the VPN
After connecting to the VPN, fire up the web browser on your Fire and simply search for “what is my ip” at google.com. You should see the IP address of your VPN, as seen below.
Now let’s disconnect from the VPN to confirm that the IP address changes to our local IP address (and not the IP address of the VPN exit node). Swipe down on the notification bar and select the entry “VPN Activated” to jump right to the VPN interface.
Click on “Disconnect” to terminate the VPN session.
Return to the web browser and refresh the “what is my IP” query. It should immediately return your local IP address, as seen below.
That’s all there is to it! At this point we’ve set up the VPN, tested that it is properly routing our traffic to the remote address, and then turned it off to confirm the change was effective. We can now use our Fire tablet anywhere in the world and it will route all our on-tablet traffic so that it appears to be coming from the VPN node and not the local connection.
