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Comment by ryanlol | Hacker News Reader

The Pi is far too slow to do more than a couple of MB/s of vpn traffic so hosting a VPN server on it feels like a rather pointless exercise.

A bit more expensive but at least 100x faster option would be https://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-A1SRi-2558F-Intel-Fanless-...

And I suppose something like https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Micro-Appliance-Gigabit-Bare... or maybe https://www.amazon.com/Solana-Tech-pfSense-firewall-router/d... would be an OK cheaper alternative.

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The Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite or Edgerouter X is cheaper and able to handle gigabit network traffic, and can terminate OpenVPN. https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-EdgeMax-EdgeRouter-ERLite-3-... or https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-EdgeRouter-Advanced-Gigabit-... but honestly so can any consumer grade router capable of running open-wrt.

>The Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite or Edgerouter X is cheaper and able to handle gigabit network traffic, and can terminate OpenVPN

After a quick look at ubnt forums looks like it'll max out around 15mbps doing openvpn https://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeMAX/EdgeRouter-Pro-OpenVPN...

You can do 100Mbit IPsec on the EdgeRouter I guess, but I think last I checked the cipher support was a bit lacking.

The supermicro board with QuickAssist should easily do gigabits of IPsec.

I have personally tried OpenVPN on an EdgeRouter PoE. The OpenVPN version in the current EdgeOS is fairly old and also has zero hardware support, so like the sibling post mentioned, it kills the bandwidth. It was something like 1 Mbit for TCP and 10-15 Mbit for UDP.

I was going to say the same. Nice exercise but poor performance for broadband speeds. A more interesting offering might be the MinnowBoard Turbot. It has an Intel Atom with Intel's AES-NI acceleration instruction. Cost is around $150.

Well my home internet isn't much better than that in the first place, so it's not a bottleneck. The same would likely hold for everyone on an ADSL connection.

Exactly. On one hand I'm happy to see people getting exposed to more of this stuff via the Pi; on the other hand I'm dismayed when they never move beyond it.

I've tested an Odroid C2 doing ~400 Mbit/s using SSH (chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com) (maxed out one of four cores). Same form factor, same GPIO pinout, similar power requirements as the Pi. Supported well-enough for virtually any application with armbian. People are gouging on price for now but even still it's only $10 more for the board and it trounces the Pi in any networking application.

True, the Pi has terrible networking over its usb bus, but those machines also cost 5-10 times as much, so you'd certainly expect more performance from them. There are a lot of ~ $100USD fanless mini-pc options (I have a Zotax Zbox) on the market that have gigbit NICs which would should get you about 10X the performance for about twice the price, e.g. http://a.co/4KsxmEa

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