This post is for a new rust project that I have been working on lately. I haven’t really touched rust much for nearly a year, but sometimes projects come up that necessitate a statically typed language. The program is a rust network proxy designed for use in HA redis deployments.
Since it has been a couple weeks since first starting to work with wireguard on OpenBSD, I figured it was about time to figure out how to get my OpenBSD desktop to act as a wireguard client. Who knows, perhaps this will one day allow me to drop my PIA VPN and shift exclusively to running my own personal VPN’s.
Well, I am no networking pro. I know there is a wg-quick script out there, but the couple of times that I tried it out on OpenBSD, it failed. I figured that there shouldn’t be that much to a wireguard tunnel, all I have to do is figure out how to establish the tunnel and force data out the tun device.
I’ve been running a OpenBSD server as my home router for a number of years now, moving between various configuration, scripts, and hardware. I’ve been running on the FW1 for a year now. I originally built the router as an escape from both ISP-provided router/modem combos, as well as custom firmware such as dd-wrt; I wanted more control.
Ever since I was a teenager, I always enjoyed the command line interface. It let me instruct EXACTLY what I wanted the OS to do, and have more control than any GUI out there. However, one area on my router that has always annoyed me was UPnP. This was, as far as I knew, a necessary evil. Without UPnP, online games had a difficult time with multiplayer.
A few years ago, I became fed up with my ISP-provided modem-router combo due to lagginess, sluggish DNS, and overall untrustworthiness. I ended up purchasing a Linksys WRT1900 and flashing it with dd-wrt, which chugged along happily for a couple years. However, later in its life, the router would sometimes stop responding, and lazily I would simply reboot it. Slowly, this pattern started occurring more and more frequently, up until the end of its life.
I decided to make a change. I had been using OpenBSD and Freebsd on and off for a better part of ten years, and I figured it was about time to move to a router that I could trust.
Earlier this week, I was casually discussing various VPN’s with my colleagues. I’ve tried my hand at OpenVPN a couple times in my life, but was turned off by the complicated setup, poor iOS compatibility (at the time), and slow reconnection speeds. The conversation quickly came to revolve around a relative newcomer to the VPN world: wireguard. With the promise of ease of use, minimalistic code base, proven security, wireguard threatens to take the VPN world by storm.