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Comment by doctoboggan | Hacker News Reader

I recently started using OpenVPN (My router comes with it pre-installed).

Does anyone know how this compares with OpenVPN? Is is worth setting up my own wiregaurd machine?

WireGuard is much faster than OpenVPN, much simpler to set up than OpenVPN (except for having to set up IP addresses it's approximately as easy to get working as SSH), and it's much, much more secure than OpenVPN.

Thanks for the information. What is your recommended way to set up a wireguard server on a home network? Some quick googling tells me it is possible to do it with a raspberry pi, but I would be worried about that being a bottleneck.

Ive had a WireGuard install running for about 6 months on a pi and as far as I can tell it hasn’t been a bottleneck. Plenty of spare cpu and bandwidth. And I’m using the 3 which only has 100mbit Ethernet.

Granted I don’t generally watch a ton of streaming video and it’s mostly just me on my network, but no issues watching YouTube or doing anything else.

I really can’t state enough how much I love my wireguard/pi hole setup.

> WireGuard is much faster than OpenVPN

Not relevant for most home internet connections

> much simpler to set up than OpenVPN

> and it's much, much more secure than OpenVPN.

That’s uselessly vague. Do you mean the protocol, the implementation approach, the underlying crypto, or what?

Yes, the protocol, yes, the implementation approach, and yes, the underlying crypto. That sounds like a snarky response, but you really did kind of cover it.

>> WireGuard is much faster than OpenVPN

> Not relevant for most home internet connections

Why it is not relevant?

I'd say it is. While I'm handwaving based on what I've read - wg should be better for voice and video chat, due to being low-overhead udp - which should translate to lower latency.

Openvpn in UDP mode running on an rpi can saturate a home connection and provide low enough latency for voice.

> Does anyone know how this compares with OpenVPN?

Much nicer to use in pretty much every aspect.

It can't be easier to setup that OpenVPN was on my router (just clicking a checkbox), but I am very interested in switching to a new VPN as I would like to be able to stay continuously connected from my mobile phone, and I understand that OpenVPN isn't great for this.

What is your preferred method for getting a WireGuard server installed on your home network?

> What is your preferred method for getting a WireGuard server installed on your home network?

Have a Linux machine that listens for incoming WireGuard connections, then it only takes generating server keys (private, public) and then adding your client's keys to the WireGuard configuration file. Setting up an OpenVPN server on a Linux box is quite a bit more involved.

I strongly suspect the pre-installed version is out-of-date.

Depending on just how our of date it is, that could be an issue: https://openvpn.net/security-advisories/

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