Self hosted VPN server at home (possible on RPi?)

VPN
1

Hey guys,

I regularly travel abroad, and would like to be able to be online as if from my home, not just my home country. Is it possible to set up a VPN server running on my home network, so I can connect to it from anywhere in the World and be through it online?

For bonus points – can it be one on a headless Raspberry Pi, are they powerful enough to route traffic? (mostly for web browsing, online banking) Its be awesome to configure it headless, and start up automatically on reboot in case of power failures…

Thanks in advance!

2

http://www.pivpn.io/ will do just that. I used it on a Pi 3, and it was fine for my 10mb upload.

3

Check if your router provides a VPN Server

4

Use wireguard, it’ll work fine. Ignore everyone else

5

Just like most the guys say, use wireguard. I have this installed on rpi3b and way faster than. OpenVPN.

6

For web browsing and light stuff, piVPN will be plenty, i run mine on a pi 3B on my home network of 60-80Mb/s down and 8-12Mb/s up.

Downloads are obviously super slow, but browsing is perfectly fine, not tested youtube or twitch, imagine those would be fine with lower quality.

7

It is going to feel super slow using any VPN software that is CPU intensive. I’ve tried openvpn on a pi and it just crawled.

8

You could go for a pfSense-based PC router to replace your current router, and then disable all routing features including DHCP to user the old router as a pure wireless accesspoint. Then you’ll have good VPN capability and still keep wireless connectivity.

9

What VPN you use depends on what device you use to connect, and how adversarial the network you will be connecting from (e.g. some hotels block VPNs). The reasonable choices are IPSec/IKEv2, Wireguard and if you must OpenVPN.

10

Possible? Yes. Speedy and effective? Not at all. You’re better off finding/building a device with hardware encryption built in (AES-NI).

11

This. Been doing it for awhile on a pi2 and pi3 works fine for what your looking for.

12

third this… i run it in a small proxmox container and it’s perfect.

13

I don’t know about dietpi, but I can definitely recommend WireGuard. It’s a breeze to set up and although it’s purely anecdotal, it seems faster than OpenVpn.

14

Just in case: Wireguard is still in beta and you should be careful that we don’t know yet how many holes it has (not fully audited).

I use it daily, and it works better than most other things, but don’t trust it (i.e. set a monitoring system to warn you from unexpected logins/weird activity and have a kill switch for your vpn).

15

hm, didn’t know it was an option, thanks! I’ll check it out

16

All of my netgear ones have, and it’s amazing.

17

Agreed. I had wireguard running on an older pi before I moved it to my main server. Connection was rock solid.

18

which RPi did you try? I’m thinking of the new RPi 4

19

What version Pi were you running? I use a 3B+ now and I can easily pull 20+Mbit/s from it using OpenVPN.

20

even for simple web browsing, online banking? I don’t need to do any heavy downloading, or game playing.