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

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

#91

Heh, right now i use WireGuard for exposing some of my homelab servers to the internet and to work around my ISPs NAT setup, WireGuard is really pleasant to use and simple to set up! I recall using OpenVPN a few years ago for a similar use case in my university dorm, it was comparatively way worse - the configuration parameters were unclear, some of the documentation was out of date and even when using the faster (bu…

I'm getting 182mbps with my VPS, (600 without).

South America 600mbps > Atlanta VPS

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

#92

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

How's Tailscale on low end VPS?

I'm on 128 Mbs RAM/1vCPU and OpenVPN hogs 100% of ram on one connection (and sometimes even when idle).

I'm searching for some resource conscious VPN server.

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

#93

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.

My VPS costs 2$/month.

How much traffic do you get? What software? OpenVPN is a resource hog.

I'm on a $10/year VPS with 100 Gb/month traffic. Not great, but not terrible.

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

#94
post #18

Since basically always, I'm still using PiVPN https://www.pivpn.io/ Is that out of favor nowadays, given new technologies like Wireguard have become mainstream? Would I be better off using this, or the Algo scripts that another commenter mentioned? ( https://github.com/trailofbits/algo )

how do you grab new IPs for your pi?

I bet he sneaks into Evil Corp and disguises it as a thermostat.

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

#96
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Last time I used sshuttle (bypassing content blocks in India by tunneling to a server in the US), my bandwidth dropped from 10mbps to 1mbps. Back then wireguard didn’t exist, but IPSEC could easily saturate the 10mbps link. I suspect it’s a combination of TCP-over-TCP and a horrible default buffer size that makes sshuttle unusably slow.

Try using DNS VPN on an airplane to bypass in-flight internet paywall, now that is some unusably slow internet. Still works though magically.

I assume you’re talking about tunneling TCP over DNS queries. Does that really work on airplanes? A link to the code would be appreciated.

I thought captive portals force you to use their DNS servers by grabbing all UDP packets with the DNS port (regardless of destination IP) and those servers respond with the webserver’s IP regardless of what you query.

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

#97

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

How's Tailscale on low end VPS? I'm on 128 Mbs RAM/1vCPU and OpenVPN hogs 100% of ram on one connection (and sometimes even when idle). I'm searching for some resource conscious VPN server.

I use Tailscale to run pihole in the cloud on gcp as my DNS server.

Pennies a day - $0.38 in January so far. This would definitely be free-tier level stuff, but for some reason they are charging me for it and it’s not worth my time to figure out why given the low cost.

I’m not using it as an exit node (haven’t gone down the hole of traffic scanning or anything like that), but that would make it more expensive.

It is nice - I can set up all my devices for pihole and block distractions, and have Tailscale on my wife’s computer to switch on when I’m using it. She doesn’t get frustrated I’ve broken the internet when she uses it and I flip Tailscale off.

I’ve also got a desktop that I can Connect into from my iPad on the road. Setting up a dev environment in a cloud platform and adding it with Tailscale would be trivial.

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

#98
The author's use for this is to circumvent geographical jurisdictional restrictions. If that is the aim (rather than privacy), then I don't understand how a $5 (per month) VPS along with all of the config and steps required (read: non-negligble time cost) is the "Poor man's" solution. Surely using any of the free forever unlimited VPNs would do the job at near zero cost?

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

#99
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

proxifer works ridiculously well for me. Its not free though.

https://www.proxifier.com/

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

#100
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try using DNS VPN on an airplane to bypass in-flight internet paywall, now that is some unusably slow internet. Still works though magically.

I assume you’re talking about tunneling TCP over DNS queries. Does that really work on airplanes? A link to the code would be appreciated. I thought captive portals force you to use their DNS servers by grabbing all UDP packets with the DNS port (regardless of destination IP) and those servers respond with the webserver’s IP regardless of what you query.

It does TXT record lookups or equivalent. Those get resolved correctly without any interference from the captive portal. Here is something similar in technical nature to what I have used in the past (free DNS VPN apps on ios) https://github.com/JadenGeller/Burrow-Client
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