Live data from Hacker News

Build your own private WireGuard VPN with PiVPN

jeffgeerling.com

101–110 of 235 posts

Re: Build your own private WireGuard VPN with PiVPN

#101

And then you hit CPU bottlenecks whenever you do literally anything bandwidth intensive. The limits of using hobbyist hardware, you get hobbyist level performance. A Raspberry Pi is a horrible solution for running Wireguard. You can get a tiny 1L PC running on an actual Intel or AMD processor with far more perf/$.

I'm not sure what's the max throughput is, but I just tested 50 Mbit down/80 Mbit up passthrough from a cafe Wi-Fi to my 3B with Wireguard (using wg-quick) at home. Seems enough for anything I'd use it for.

Heck, that's more than what most people I know get at home

Re: Build your own private WireGuard VPN with PiVPN

#102
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apparently a lot of US business sites refuse to connect from oversea IP because (...) they just don't want to deal with it I am French. What I find fascinating is that there are local US newspapers (that server a tiny community) that went through the effort to do a geoblock from the EU and put a page along the lines "we cannot be compliant to Privacy laws in the EU so we must block you". Why do they care at all? Ho…

Most small local newspapers are owned by huge megacorps. GDPR EU laws and some others explicitly say that they can be enforced to entities outside the EU. I don't know if it has ever been enforced, except for large multinationals. The US does do that kind of thing though. As a dev, break some law, step foot in the US for a conference, get arrested (ex: Sklyarov 2001 case, for breaking PDF encryption). Although for mo…

> GDPR EU laws and some others explicitly say that they can be enforced to entities outside the EU

They can tell whatever they want, but it would need to be a US court (in that case) who would do the litigation. Which they won't.

> The US does do that kind of thing though. As a dev, break some law, step foot in the US for a conference, get arrested

yes, this is why I mentioned that my point is only for local businesses. Travel or business in the EU can/will be problematic.

> Heck, I was in Mexico and I couldn't login to my provincial government tax portal. There are constant security issues with those sites.

Blocking for security is another thing. Maybe a good idea, maybe not - but that's another story.

Re: Build your own private WireGuard VPN with PiVPN

#107

I run wg-easy https://github.com/WeeJeWel/wg-easy for this sort of thing. I use the docker container, and it's great. "Just works". Also, unrelated, I just decided I don't like the sentiment of "PiMyProjectName" branding. I know most projects don't just run on a Pi, and that the intent is to say "you can self-host thing", but at this point if you want to run a home server sort of thing, just buy some cheap 100-200 do…

> I run wg-easy https://github.com/WeeJeWel/wg-easy for this sort of thing. I use the docker container, and it's great. "Just works".

This looks great, thank you! My current home router(s) fortunately support Wireguard natively, but I'll look into this if I'm ever again forced to use a shitty CPE.

> I'm pretty dismissive of ARM chips for homelab stuff at this point. There's super cheap minipcs with "real" processors [...]

What makes an ARM SoC a "non-real processor"? I'm typing this on a laptop with an ARM CPU, and it's the fastest hardware I've ever worked on.

Re: Build your own private WireGuard VPN with PiVPN

#108

I run wg-easy https://github.com/WeeJeWel/wg-easy for this sort of thing. I use the docker container, and it's great. "Just works". Also, unrelated, I just decided I don't like the sentiment of "PiMyProjectName" branding. I know most projects don't just run on a Pi, and that the intent is to say "you can self-host thing", but at this point if you want to run a home server sort of thing, just buy some cheap 100-200 do…

I’ve been curious about the performance gap here – you can open htop on a pi 4 and see that CPU utilization is relatively low, ~33% out of 400%, something like that, and yet some operations seem like they take 5-6x longer than they ought to on a “normal” computer.

Is it all down to the file system? Is the CPU just in interrupt overload all the time? I wish I had a better understanding of the issue here.

Re: Build your own private WireGuard VPN with PiVPN

#109

I run wg-easy https://github.com/WeeJeWel/wg-easy for this sort of thing. I use the docker container, and it's great. "Just works". Also, unrelated, I just decided I don't like the sentiment of "PiMyProjectName" branding. I know most projects don't just run on a Pi, and that the intent is to say "you can self-host thing", but at this point if you want to run a home server sort of thing, just buy some cheap 100-200 do…

The Pis shine primarily in terms of power consumption, under load, a mini PC could cosume 50W, where a Pi (and other ARM boards) will do an absolute maximum of 15W. And if you have multiple devices that run 24/7, that could be a significant saving
Post reply on HN