I am trying to wrap my head around what Wireguard is exactly. I just have a simple home server running Unraid and everything I see says Wireguard is one of the must use features of it. What exactly is it? Is it a free VPN that you can use instead or NordVPN or PIA?
Wireguard is a VPN. A personal one for that matter. I use it to connect to my home network while I’m away so I can do maintenance on my servers without opening them up to the world.
Edit: it’s different from nord or any other vpn. It doesn’t connect you to other servers (although nothing stopping you from connecting to someone else’s service). Think of it more of similar to OpenVPN
Wireguard is a protocol basically. It is fast and reliable (after beta). It is really fast. You can’t even compare it to OpenVPN. Did I mention it is fast?
You can run your own service and close the other ports so this will make your server more secure. You can connect to pia, VPN provider 1, VPN provider 2, etc services with this protocol if they support it.
You can set up wireguard on your server and use it as your private VPN server. I am doing this with my US and UK servers when I am abroad on holiday. My company has a strict IP policy so I need to have a UK IP at all times. So it is handy, secure, and mine.
Reliability part: I am running a wireguard instance for the last 365+ days and it never crashed.
Nord and PIA are VPN providers, they lease you access to a VPN.
Wireguard is just one potential underlying technologies of a VPN service. It’s usually considered faster than traditional VPNs like IPSEC.
You can absolutely host your own in any direction such as your phone or laptop VPNing into your home, or your device to a cloud server or both even.
I also enjoy that I get the benefit of my Pi Holes while out and about either on my phone or laptop.
I strongly suggest using wireguard on your router, dd-wrt has it built in on most builds. This way you can reboot the server, or do what you need to do without worrying about losing connectivity to your network.
Wireguard is a super-fast protocol for making secure tunnels from one point on the net to another using public/private key exchange (like most ssh sessions). OpenVPN is the comparable platform-- far larger codebase (and more features, to be fair), far slower (tho it rarely matters).
https://restoreprivacy.com/vpn/wireguard-vs-openvpn/ might help explain some of what the big deal is.
A VPN is a basically a virtual LAN cable between two networks or two computers (or a mix of the two). When you use a VPN provider like Nord, you are connecting your device to their network and essentially it looks like you’re just communicating with Nord’s servers, not Netflix or YouTube or whatever. Everyone else along the way can just see the “cable” not the contents.
Wireguard is a VPN protocol, like OpenVPN and others. PIA has Wireguard support, as an example. But when you create your own VPN server using UnRAID and the protocol of your choice (like Wireguard), you can virtually connect to your server or network from anywhere.
If you’re trying to hide your traffic from your ISP or appear as if you’re in a different company, it won’t do that. If you’re out and about, you’ll basically appear as if you’re accessing the internet from your house.
If you just need to access your UNRAID or other things from the outside, you could easily do it with just ssh and port forwarding tunnels. Way easier. Just ensure that you use key auth in your SSH port. If you want it to do more, like send traffic easily, wireguard is awesome. I don’t personally wireguard but do have SSH always open with fail2ban, etc.
It’s the VPN’s protocol. Openvpn or wireguard these days generally. It’s way better than openvpn.
I run a client on my torrent app and then have a server running to connect remotely to my network.
Using a VPN is about the most secure way to access a local network remotely.
Thanks for sharing this. It s a good reminder for all of us to protect our networks
So is this different than using the My Servers plugin then? That is what I currently use to connect to my Unraid server remotely.
Is it better to setup wireguard on Router (which I have done) or on Unraid?
Wireguard is SO much faster than openVPN (connections almost instant off/on) and I really like it, but just wondering if I should change my setup. Despite me being able to connect from router and connect to my unraid server via IP login, when I do a network search for server shares I’m not seeing anything from unraid when I connect via my router VPN.
Running a consulting personalized IT firm. I install wireguard (I’ll call it PiGuard) to pretty much every job site for remote management if needed. Never let’s me down.
So I could setup Wireguard on my server and that will make my home LAN accessible remotely from any computer just as if I were plugged in at home directly? Am I understanding that correctly?
Ah yes that would be a good plus there.
You’d need to use a plug-in that supports the wireguard protocol. Dynamix makes a plug-in for wireguard. I personally am using a raspberry pi with PiVPN setup on it using the wireguard protocol. imo having your vpn on another device is more ideal so you don’t have one single point of failure.
It’s different in the way that it doesn’t expose your server to the internet. When away, you connect to your server via WireGuard and can interact with your LAN just as if you were at home. This is exactly the same way you would use OpenVPN, however WireGuard is generally a bit easier to set up and is much faster.
For the whole network, not just your server. I use it as a tunnel so when I’m in hotel wifi or any wifi really there’s absolutely no snooping on me. 100% tunneled via my home wifi.
You cant use my unRAID to manage inside dockers or pop out windows though. With WireGuard you can. You can also access your shares remotely with WireGuard.