What is everyone else using for VPN solutions and what are the trade offs?
I want a VPN to access all my personal devices and use services like Syncthing. I use it on my phone so it can’t use ungodly amounts of idle data.
I looked at Netbird but found the idle data usage almost 1GB per few days using JetBird with Lazy connections. I tried the default app but it makes me SSO login every day or two, it wouldn’t stay connected, and it still used a reasonable amount of idle data.
I looked at Tailscale but I’m not going to lock access to all my devices behind a Google account login or some other third party service login for no reason. It seems like hosting my own auth server is too much additional risk as well. I tried self hosting headscale which worked well except that I have no decent front end to easily add devices. I have to log into a terminal, then execute docker commands which was a huge pain in the ass. I didn’t even touch on any of the firewalling or routing that can be done because it was so much more complex in headscale then in a web interface. I tried hosting two or three headscale front ends but couldn’t get one working that supported most of the available feature set. Usually I was given generic connection errors with no clear way to diagnose or clear troubleshooting steps so after a few hours I moved on.
Nothing, mostly. Will use point-to-point Wireguard once I get around to setting up Prometheus ingestion.
What do you need a VPN for?
Accessing my dozen services running on my server, plus accessing some other specific devices running in various other places I am not going to open to the internet. Media machine, a second server, laptop, router without opening it to the internet, printers, etc.
I don’t care about the “make your traffic come from somewhere else”, just the “all my devices in my network no matter where they are” bit.