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Comment by Sirened | Hacker News Reader

It's cool but the author's motivation doesn't make sense.

OpenVPN was too hard to setup so they decided to write their own VPN from scratch? It's cool as an academic endeavor but by actually using it, they not only tossed out all the years of security work and the audits OpenVPN has gone through but also spent a ton of time creating something that they now will have to personally maintain.

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OpenVPN is more than just hard to setup, it's legitimately absurd and the documentation isn't even close to navigable.

I'm glad it's not just me...

I've tried 3 separate times now to set up the necessary pieces. I get all the way to the end and it just... doesn't work. And I'm just not a good enough network engineer to sniff out why.

A lot of people in the low-end VPS community use this [1] -- and I've used it ever since. The installation script just works. Adding a new user? Run the script. I don't think we're alone in the struggle.

https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install

Thanks for the resource! It's always a pet project to try and set it up, so I never researched any install helpers very heavily. I'll definitely try this next.

Openvpn takes some work to setup, but it works over proxies very very well. I can vpn into my cloud vm over the corporate squid based proxy (barracuda and plain squid) from my linux desktop, over port 443. But yes, things could be much more simple to setup for the average user, it shouldnt take hours to lean configs and setup.

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