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How to build your own VPN, or: the history of WARP

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: How to build your own VPN, or: the history of WARP

#11

Post by inemesitaffia »

kro wrote: post #7
aborsy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that everyone says and nobody does. Do your friends do that? The majority of people have no idea what is VPN or Tailscale and would be suspicious that you might be placing a hacking device or proxy for visiting bad websites in their home.

Some people also do run Tor exit nodes on their ISP connections, of course receiving tons of abuse complaints, but apparently it's legal enough.

So people may be willing to do it for strangers in exchange for paying the bills.

Re: How to build your own VPN, or: the history of WARP

#12

Post by vjerancrnjak »

fragmede wrote: post #2

at Cloudflare scale, absolutely. But today? Find a friend that lives in a different legal jusrisdiction that you trust. Install Tailscale on a raspberry pi Zero. Configure it all up. Send it to your friend. Get it on their wifi. Set up the corresponding app on your phone. Connect to it and use it as your exit node. Voila, VPN!

Won’t work if behind CGNAT or will be insanely slow. Even ipv6 is not advertised sometimes.

I miss the days when I could ssh to my computer with ddns.

Re: How to build your own VPN, or: the history of WARP

#13

Post by Arainach »

invaliduser wrote: post #10
silisili wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's zero chance I'd put some random device from anyone, even a friend, on my network - especially if I knew that was its purpose. Sounds like a huge liability. Do people really do this?

Most people have no sense of security. They say yes to strangers if asked to plug in a USB device on their laptop. When I said no in the train to someone asking to plug their device "for charging", I was definitely the bad guy. Just find anything plausible, for backup storage, or say, to share family photos with grand parents but it does not work on my home wifi because my ISP is blocking ports, whatever.

So now the plan is to lie to people to get them to do something for you under false pretenses?

Re: How to build your own VPN, or: the history of WARP

#14

Post by hdgvhicv »

vjerancrnjak wrote: post #12
fragmede wrote: post #2

at Cloudflare scale, absolutely. But today? Find a friend that lives in a different legal jusrisdiction that you trust. Install Tailscale on a raspberry pi Zero. Configure it all up. Send it to your friend. Get it on their wifi. Set up the corresponding app on your phone. Connect to it and use it as your exit node. Voila, VPN!

Won’t work if behind CGNAT or will be insanely slow. Even ipv6 is not advertised sometimes. I miss the days when I could ssh to my computer with ddns.

Choose an isp which gives you a static ipv4 address then.

Re: How to build your own VPN, or: the history of WARP

#15

Post by yoavm »

aborsy wrote: post #3
fragmede wrote: post #2

at Cloudflare scale, absolutely. But today? Find a friend that lives in a different legal jusrisdiction that you trust. Install Tailscale on a raspberry pi Zero. Configure it all up. Send it to your friend. Get it on their wifi. Set up the corresponding app on your phone. Connect to it and use it as your exit node. Voila, VPN!

This is something that everyone says and nobody does. Do your friends do that? The majority of people have no idea what is VPN or Tailscale and would be suspicious that you might be placing a hacking device or proxy for visiting bad websites in their home.

My siblings and I live in 3 different continents. We use Tailscale exactly for that. It's also installed on some of the VPS I own, so all-in-all we have around 7 exit nodes in different countries to choose from. It was really a breeze to set up.

The best part is that our IPs never seemed to be blocked by any service provider.

Re: How to build your own VPN, or: the history of WARP

#16

Post by Jnr »

vjerancrnjak wrote: post #12
fragmede wrote: post #2

at Cloudflare scale, absolutely. But today? Find a friend that lives in a different legal jusrisdiction that you trust. Install Tailscale on a raspberry pi Zero. Configure it all up. Send it to your friend. Get it on their wifi. Set up the corresponding app on your phone. Connect to it and use it as your exit node. Voila, VPN!

Won’t work if behind CGNAT or will be insanely slow. Even ipv6 is not advertised sometimes. I miss the days when I could ssh to my computer with ddns.

Tailscale uses STUN to do hole punching, there is a big chance that nodes would be able to achieve direct connection even if both are behind NAT.

Re: How to build your own VPN, or: the history of WARP

#17

Post by spwa4 »

yoavm wrote: post #15
aborsy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that everyone says and nobody does. Do your friends do that? The majority of people have no idea what is VPN or Tailscale and would be suspicious that you might be placing a hacking device or proxy for visiting bad websites in their home.

My siblings and I live in 3 different continents. We use Tailscale exactly for that. It's also installed on some of the VPS I own, so all-in-all we have around 7 exit nodes in different countries to choose from. It was really a breeze to set up. The best part is that our IPs never seemed to be blocked by any service provider.

Isn't ssh -D + configuring a socks proxy in your browser a lot easier and faster? (using one of the many proxy switcher extensions) It would only work for the browser (although you do have socksify), but much quicker to set up and only ssh needs to work. No software install whatsoever. I mean, at least for VPSes, of course this won't work without an IP to connect to, or an IP behind NAT.

But: no software install.

Re: How to build your own VPN, or: the history of WARP

#18

Post by fragmede »

aborsy wrote: post #3
fragmede wrote: post #2

at Cloudflare scale, absolutely. But today? Find a friend that lives in a different legal jusrisdiction that you trust. Install Tailscale on a raspberry pi Zero. Configure it all up. Send it to your friend. Get it on their wifi. Set up the corresponding app on your phone. Connect to it and use it as your exit node. Voila, VPN!

This is something that everyone says and nobody does. Do your friends do that? The majority of people have no idea what is VPN or Tailscale and would be suspicious that you might be placing a hacking device or proxy for visiting bad websites in their home.

The thing that Tailscale also allows you to do is access systems on the tailnet, without exposing those servers to the Internet. For the self-hoster with friends, this is really really useful.

Do I think this is a thing that more people than you think are doing? Given that you're questioning if it happens at all, I'd say yes.

Do I think this is at all common or normal? Absolutely not. My friends and their friends are very technical compared to the general population, so it's not surprising that something "weird" like this would be overrepresented, but even then it's not commonplace to share with friends. You really need some tight-knit bonds in order for it to work. Bonds that many people don't have a ton of.

I should mention though, it's not just "bad" websites. A lot of websites geolocate, and for foreign nationals, those websites don't make content available outside the country (for whatever reason). So for a taste of streaming TV from home, a residential proxy in the home country does the trick to let them watch "local" news of home.

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