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Comment by icelancer | Hacker News Reader

From the WireGuard installation instructions:

"Generate a private and public key pair for the WireGuard server:"

"umask 077 wg genkey | tee privatekey | wg pubkey > publickey"

"This will save both the private and public keys to your home directory; they can be viewed with cat privatekey and cat publickey respectively."

"Create the file /etc/wireguard/wg0.conf and add the contents indicated below. You’ll need to enter your server’s private key in the PrivateKey field, and its IP addresses in the Address field."

That's not within reach of your average computer user.

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It is just as easy as sshuttle to set up. I never said it was easy for an average computer user. Average computer users will probably buy some service which uses WireGuard under the hood.

> That's not within reach of your average computer user.

Same for sshutle.

I don't think anyone is under the delusion that non-technical users are going to use sshuttle, but not everyone has the will to invest the time and effort doing server side configuration of a VPN client for their personal use. sshuttle makes it simple for anyone who is the least bit familiar with ssh and has some kind of server access or is happy to spin up a VPS quickly, nothing more is necessary.

There are plenty of scripts online that make it incredibly trivial to set up WireGuard (here's mine[1]). This isn't like configuring OpenVPN -- it actually only takes a minute or two to set up.

Given that WireGuard is headed for inclusion into Linux mainline soon, it probably would be a good idea for folks to take a few minutes to learn how to use a technology that is going to be part of core Linux.

[1]: https://github.com/cyphar/dotfiles/blob/master/.local/bin/wg...

Not fair, OpenVPN doesn't take that much more than a "minute or two" to set up and configure. ;) Last time I launched it[1], I could launch and connect to a new OpenVPN instance in less than six minutes, from my iPhone. Desktop is even faster.

[1]: https://github.com/jenh/sevenminutevpn

There are scripts To install OpenVPN in 5 minutes as well so Wireguard has absolutely no advantage there.

Well yes, but OpenVPN has many dozens of different options and my experience with it is that it's a pain in the ass to get the right set of options (on both the client and server) which result in minimal latency and maximum throughput.

But you're quite right that if you already have a config that you know works, WireGuard has no significant advantage in this area (in terms of ease-of-configuration -- though the keys being quite short is nice for SSH-like key distribution). But if you're starting from scratch then you need to first figure out what is the right configuration to use (or you need to pick from the many dozens of "set up OpenVPN quickly" scripts) and then you need to hope that your configuration is not insecure.

WireGuard can be set up and work just as well as any other configuration without a script in a couple of minutes (or less than a minute with a script). The script that was linked in a sister comment to "set up OpenVPN quickly" also sets up Apache for god's sake...

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