Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 106 posts

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#71

Post by sascha_sl »

rmkrmk wrote: post #57
shepherdjerred wrote: post #37

Nothing will ever beat Tailscale (it is by far my favorite piece of software in this space)

Tailscale is just great! It's so easy to use, I have it running on all my devices and servers, so I can connect to them from wherever I want, and with the "Exit Node" feature you can also select a system to route all traffic through (and switch easily between them, at least on mobile).

Tailscale still takes some rather drastic measures to make itself work magically which have occasionally broken other things.

For instance, I can't connect to a work VPN (vpnc) properly while tailscaled is running because Tailscale hijacked my resolver entirely. It does that even on resolved.

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#72

Post by sascha_sl »

throaway46546 wrote: post #58
julienb_sea wrote: post #20

My cyberghost vpn is under 3$/mo and has unlimited usage. It's hard to imagine any pay-as-you-go scheme coming even close from a cost perspective.

The only downside is VPN provider endpoints are blocked by many services.

You have the same problem on most VPS providers too.

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#73

Post by vondro »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #37

Nothing will ever beat Tailscale (it is by far my favorite piece of software in this space)

Thank you for pointing out Tailscale. It seems like it's exactly what I was looking for, with free tier being completely sufficient. I set up smarthome network (zigbee2mqtt running on orangePi) and also endpoint in neighbouring country.

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#74

Post by ShortStretto »

forty wrote: post #65
gibs0ns wrote: post #40

I've generally considered an SSH tunnel as a poor man's VPN. If you're going to the effort to spinup a machine, and use SSH anyway, i find it much easier to use `ssh user@server.com -D 4444` then I can set my browser's proxy settings to use localhost:4444 as a SOCKS5 proxy. For those apps that don't have native proxy support, I use proxychains to force them over a proxy connection. Ofcourse this is only useful for a…

I just want to mention sshuttle [1] which self describes as poor's man VPN and works well in my experience. [1] https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle

I've recently come across sshuttle and wondered if there was a Windows alternative, anyone know of one?

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#76

Post by mihcsab »

feupan wrote: post #31
julienb_sea wrote: post #20

My cyberghost vpn is under 3$/mo and has unlimited usage. It's hard to imagine any pay-as-you-go scheme coming even close from a cost perspective.

Indeed. From the title I imagined a setup that launched an EC2 machine and then shut it down after disconnection. That’s the only way to pay cents per month assuming you’re not connected to a VPN 24/7 Managing your own server at 5$/month does not make sense from any perspective other than “privacy” if you believe that.

you can get a performant 4 core arm64 vps from oracle for free, had no speed impediment with wireguard on it. It's free 24/7... the affordability of arm...

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#77

Post by SergeAx »

julienb_sea wrote: post #20

My cyberghost vpn is under 3$/mo and has unlimited usage. It's hard to imagine any pay-as-you-go scheme coming even close from a cost perspective.

Your commercial VPN provider may collect data about you (and make larger profit from it, not from your fee). I don't mean using commercial VPN is bad, just keeping this in mind.

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#78

Post by qiqitori »

gibs0ns wrote: post #40

I've generally considered an SSH tunnel as a poor man's VPN. If you're going to the effort to spinup a machine, and use SSH anyway, i find it much easier to use `ssh user@server.com -D 4444` then I can set my browser's proxy settings to use localhost:4444 as a SOCKS5 proxy. For those apps that don't have native proxy support, I use proxychains to force them over a proxy connection. Ofcourse this is only useful for a…

Just be careful with -D, as it is relatively easy to accidentally make it possible for other computers to use your computer as a proxy too. By default, GatewayPorts in the sshd config is set to 'no', which will prevent this from happening. However, you or someone else may have set this to 'yes' at some point for some purpose. To be safe even in that case, you may want to use 'ssh -D127.0.0.1:4444' instead of just '-D4444'.

I have accidentally opened an internal network to the public this way. (Nothing bad happened.)

Re: Poor man's VPN (pay for only what you need)

#79

Post by axegon_ »

gibs0ns wrote: post #40

I've generally considered an SSH tunnel as a poor man's VPN. If you're going to the effort to spinup a machine, and use SSH anyway, i find it much easier to use `ssh user@server.com -D 4444` then I can set my browser's proxy settings to use localhost:4444 as a SOCKS5 proxy. For those apps that don't have native proxy support, I use proxychains to force them over a proxy connection. Ofcourse this is only useful for a…

This is what I've always done should I face some blocking or whatever - spin up the lowest tier vm on gcp in whichever region suits me, do my business, kill and bury the vm.
Post reply on HN