Raspberry Pi for self hosted VPN?

Site Feedback
1

Looking setting up a VPN on a Pi or similar to allow me to remotely access the network at my parents. Mostly to help out for monitoring purposes (CCTV), but also uploading sharing files photos, family videos etc…

Thinking of using a Raspberry Pi, or some other small form factor device. It would need to be silent, and have a low power consumption.

I’ve previously had a Pi 4 8gb, but I think this is overkill, and isn’t really that low powered. We have a minimum of 300Mbp/s connection up/down, but of course won’t need anything like that speed.

Any suggestions in terms of the device?

2

If you already have a Pi, there’s PiVPN so it would take a couple of minutes to try it out. I have tried it and think I got something like 30Mbps.

3

Many routers provide a pre-shipped VPN solution, so you may be able to use that without additional hardware.

Otherwise, any Raspberry Pi should be sufficient. I’d still go with a RPi4, which allows full 1Gbit utilization. It consumes nearly nothing (4W or so), but is still versatile for additional stuff besides a simple VPN solution.

As u/jafinn already mentioned, you can use PiVPN. Alternatively, use Docker and a Wireguard VPN container such as https://github.com/WeeJeWel/wg-easy.

4

the cleanest / simplest VPN solution i’ve seen (and use) that works on the Pi (in docker) is Wireguard and specifically WG-EASY… it’s so simple to set up and has a nice GUI for creating clients…

I’ve tried pretty much all of the current solutions and this is my daily driver… I’m literally connected to it all day from work.

5

PiVPN with Wireguard is super fast and easy to setup and does exactly what you want. RPi4 works well for this whereas older Pi’s will be much more limiited in network speeds due to encryption overhead and low bandwidth. I use an Odroid N4+ with Ubuntu Mate for mine.

6

I use this on a Pi2 and it’s plenty fast.

7

I don’t think you should be expecting anywhere near 1 Gbps on a Pi 4 as there’s no hardware crypto acceleration. An old Intel CPU with AES-NI support will run circles around it.

I should’ve probably mentioned in my comment that my 30 Mbps was with a Pi4. I imagine you could easily double that by tweaking it a bit though but I just tried it and spun up a VM instead.

8

Many routers provide a pre-shipped VPN solution

Now you mention it. The router has the following services:

L2TP/IPSec

PPTP
OpenVPN

I have a little familiarity with openVPN so could try that.

9

+1 for wg-easy. I run this on my Pi, super sleek

10

Yeah, a RPI4 or similar device with PiVPN and Wireguard is definitely the best option here (if you can find an RPI). I get more than 300mbps on my Wireguard box, that uses a NanoPi Neo3 board, running DietPi.

11

Hi,

could you stream HD videos (one client) with that setup?

12

Yeah sure, you won’t get 1Gbit over VPN but at least you can utilize your 1Gbit LAN connection from router to the RPi4. The older models e.g. share their bandwidth with USB, which may further decrease the overall speed, especially for VPN.

13

You should get better than 30 on a RPi4. I used to get 50 on a 3b+. With Odroid N4+ i get around 100.

14

I just ran a speed test and got 55mbps up and down, not bad for an old pi with a 100mbps ethernet interface. So, yes, should be fine for 4k.

15

Wow, thank you…
I have been planning to do the same, with the same setup, but until now I have been sceptical about performance

16

My pi 2 runs pihole for the whole house and wireguard. I used a pi4 for awhile but it was total overkill so I went down to a Pi2 and didn’t notice a difference. Both my wife and I work from home and my network has over 50 active nodes and the Pi2 does just fine.