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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

I was sick of having to install VPN software on all of my devices, and couldn't on some of the older ones, so I put the VPN inside the router itself. Plug for one of my side businesses https://easyvpnrouter.com/

You can do it yourself, but it's a big hassle, maybe someone finds this useful.

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Off-topicness aside, I see no proof that you are not selling spyware in a box

Right, especially if you are selling it as something to maintain privacy, I'd like to see the source code.

It uses vanilla OpenWRT. The app to configure it is just react native and speaks OpenWRT API's. The only thing I could open source are 1) How I flash the router and configure it, which is a hassle and I'm not going to share, and 2) The source code to the react native app, which you can decompile and look at if you want.

If you want to see the open source of the router software itself, go to https://openwrt.org/ and dive in

Being able to see source code and certifying the binaries running on the machine are not the same thing.

As I say on the FAQ page, all of it uses open source software, and you can SSH onto the box and see it. I don't open source the methods of installing and configuring it because that's the whole business. This is no different than you buying a flashed router from anywhere else, could always be spyware in your hardware.

I've wanted to setup my router with my VPN, but the only thing stopping me is that, AFAIK, some services won't work with most big VPN services - like Netflix.

I use iVPN and can't stream Netflix while connected.

Not just Netflix (where it makes some sense because they are forced by content distributors to enforce geo-fencing of content), but I have had random websites stop working on VPN. Often I've given up on a website thinking it's a bug on their end, before realizing that it's not working because I am on VPN.

Maybe they do it to prevent anonymous attacks or something, I dunno, but it's quite annoying because they fail in very vague and unclear ways.

I have a private Streisand server [0] running for that reason. I got tired of dealing with most of the IPs for big VPN services being blocked on a lot of websites.

[0]: https://github.com/jlund/streisand

Where do you run it? Some of those same sites that block VPNs also block AWS IP blocks, and may also block other cloud providers as well.

I would be interested in this as well.

1. Where are you hosting it, and do you ever get blocked from certain services or websites?

2. How much does it cost? Is it a fixed cost, or bandwidth-dependent?

3. What do your down/up speeds look like when connected?

To answer you both:

I host mine on a DigitalOcean instance. The Streisand installer (bash script + Ansible playbook) has a number of built-in deployment targets (Amazon, DigitalOcean, Google, Linode, and Rackspace at the time I did mine), and you can further select which region you want. It costs $5/mo, though there would be a cost for bandwidth overage if you hit your limit for the instance size.

I have not done a speed test on it as I have always been constrained by my local connection more than the server's end. I use it only when traveling at the moment.

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