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Comment by yamrzou | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have suggestions for the smallest physical device that can function as a WireGuard server or a Tailscale exit node with decent performance?

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I have had great luck with https://www.gl-inet.com/ travel routers as line speed Wireguard endpoints. Works on fiber and StarLink equally well.

They have also Tailscale plug-in. You have to trust the company out of China or HK, though.

I agree with this recommendation - they work great with Wireguard. And if you're travelling, some of the features like handling captive portals are handy.

They are good wireguard clients but not servers

What's the difference?

On GL.iNet website they state: "OpenVPN and WireGuard speeds will be slower when running the device as a server. Results above are in client mode."

The Lenovo Thinkcentre M series tiny or a HP mini are the sweet spot for me.

For less than $200 you can get a used one with 16GB of RAM and a fast SSD.

For home servers I want low power usage and reliability. Mine idle at 5W running proxmox.

This explicitly doesn't answer your question as written, but just in case it's relevant to you anyway: you can run something like pfSense in a VM on a server or really any machine you have available on the network where you want an exit node. At least on Linux, the software networking support is good enough to make such a VM appear as just another machine on the network the VM host is connected to.

My primary home router is a pfSense VM set up as a Wireguard peer for tunneling in from various other devices and locations, and I'm very happy with it.

Probably something like an n100 based "NUC" type deal. Its has loads of float performance and is much better suited to being a "server" than a pi (much as I love the pi)

If the goal is smallest VPN box instead of best for the price server then the float performance doesn't really matter much and both are probably overkill -> too large. Both the n100 and the pi 5 can reach multiple gbps of wireguard throughput, whatever you can get in the smaller total form factor is more ideal than ridiculous throughput.

A table of devices and wg speeds can be found here https://forum.openwrt.org/t/a-wireguard-comparison-db/187586. There are plenty of interesting tiny options, particularly if you don't need a full gig.

GLiNet AR300M Travel router. I don't think you could make a smaller one even going DIY (with a case, that is). Perf is 50mb with Wireguard officially.

I'm currently using my Unifi Cloud Gateway Ultra router as a Wireguard server for my home network and it's at least somewhat compact with good performance. Before that I used to have a Dell WYSE 3040 that's also quite compact but maybe a bit less so on the performance side.

Maybe not the absolute smallest but Unifi cloud gateways are very small.

https://ui.com/us/en/cloud-gateways/compact

I run a WireGuard server on my wireless router. The router itself is not tiny, the size of a two-inch-thick trade paperback. But the marginal size of the WireGuard device is zero, because i need the router anyway.

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