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Comment by milankragujevic | Hacker News Reader

I have the opposite experience. Setting up OpenVPN is as easy as:

* inspect the file manually for malware etc.*

sudo bash ./vpn.sh

You enter your IP, port, protocol, client name and it generates a .ovpn file that you import into any client and it just works.

If you need to revoke a client or add another one, re-run the script and it will ask you what to do. It can also uninstall itself safely.

I still haven't managed to setup WireGuard.

OpenVPN gets about 40 Mbps for me on the Pi, but my upload is less, so I don't need more. On a VPS, it gets about 90 Mbps.

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For things that run on my home server I like to at least have the impression I know what I'm installing and how it is configured, so a magic script like you referred to is not really an option.

I used this guide to configure OpenVPN [1], which you could almost publish as a paperback ;-)

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...

Well, you could always open the script.

It's magic in that it does everything itself, it's not a black box.

It's only 460 lines with whitespace and comments, including the files it's writing to the filesystem.

I agree that setting up OpenVPN for the first time might be quite messy, so such script can be useful - it is quite simple and lets you do standard setup.

What I am wondering - it is using a pregenerated dh param file (I can understsand why - to make the initial process faster). I am not much into crypto, with all the other elements being created during the setup process, how big no-no is having a predefined dh file?

For me OpenVPN server was not that hard to manually set up, but clients were really messy. I had various problems with both OpenVPN for Android and Tunnelblick (for macOS), where the latter were problematic enough for me to switch to WireGuard with no regret.

I had no problems with OpenVPN Connect which is the "official" client for Android. For a short time I used Mac OS X (before rebranding), Tunnelblick never worked properly. I forgot the exact problems, but mainly crashing of the software that locks up all network interfaces until reboot, constant disconnecting, and one text field which was unfillable.

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