Just wanted to drop a hello!
I work in public safety IT, but my background is all MS / Windows. I’ve not tinkered much in the Linux world outside VMWare.
Recently I was blessed with a brand new symmetrical gigabit fiber connection in my neighborhood. I work from home full time and run a small consulting business from home so this was awesome!
I decided to start looking for VPN server solutions that could utilize as much of my gig upload as possible. I have an ASUS RT-AC86U router that can run OpenVPN, but the best performance I could get out of it with a light overclock and active cooling was around 40 mbps. That speed pegged one of the routers cores at 100% since OVPN Is single-threaded.
Next I tried OpenVPN’s access server virtual appliance on my VMWare host. With it I didn’t get much more than the router could provide.
Tried SoftEther VPN inside a VM, a little better, but not by much.
After a few days of Googling I came across Wireguard. As I read more and more I got a Google result for DietPi mentioning it included Wireguard, so I grabbed the DietPi VMWare image and fired it up in VMWare Workstation. 120-180Mbps. I was impressed with both Wireguard and DietPi.
Remembering that the RPi 4 was recently released, and not having a current hobby project, I figured why not give it a shot. Bought a RPi4 B, a small case with a fan and got everything setup.
Installed DietPi + Wireguard, configured it and copied the config file to my Windows laptop. Using my old cable ISP with a gig down I was able to get over 500mbps through Wireguard doing a Windows SMB file copy! Didn’t even stress the CPU on the RPi4!
The Wireguard setup was pretty easy with the exception of the static IP. Setting a static IP in dietpi-config prevented Wireguard from loading. I just dropped a post in the troubleshooting forum for that. Setting it back to DHCP allows Wireguard to load, so I just configured a DHCP reservation for the RPi4 MAC on my router until I can figure the static IP issue out.
Huge thanks to all of the Devs and anyone else who has worked / is working on DietPi! I signed on as a Patreon backer as I’d much rather send some money you guys’ way than a commercial VPN vendor!