Wireguard

A rather long title but the post is about self-hosted open-source mesh VPN with IPv6 support and works with nodes behind CGNAT!
This will be a long post documenting the concept of mesh VPN, the problem it is solving as well as a working demo. If you are not planning to deploy it right away, you can skip the post after the “Configs and setup” section.

Problem

I am running a site-to-site VPN for a long time between various servers located far away from each other. Originally these used to be on OpenVPN and later I moved to wireguard. These were not mesh but rather in a linear topology. I would have a home node here in Rohtak connected to two different servers in Mumbai over two different ISPs (via policy-based routing), those two Mumbai nodes would maintain the site-to-site VPNs with a few servers in Europe & those servers further connect to a few servers in the US. This setup ensured private network connectivity with encryption so that I can have GitLab runners spread around based on available CPU load and those runners would speak to database/storage servers securely without having to deal with encryption on per project/app basis. This also gave me basic features like running cameras are home which feeds into the Frigate instance in Mumbai for motion detection-based recording, monitoring these cameras & other device uptime using the uptime-kuma instance in Ashburn etc.

Day 16 of lockdown here in Haryana due to Covid19. Time for some distraction.

Last week it was reported that Wireguard will be added in next version of Linux kernel. I have been using Wireguard from over a year and it has been working great. I replaced OpenVPN with Wireguard for both site to site VPN as well as client-server VPN. If you are looking for a free open source VPN for remote employees or just connecting to your own remote servers Wireguard can be a really good candidate.

This is a common discussion topic when I tell friends in Indian network operators that I work from home. As soon as I say that, they ask me - “How good is the connectivity at your home?” And of course like all answers in engineering - it depends. :)

So I have two links at my home: IAXN and Siti broadband. IAXN is a FTTH connection with 50Mbps down and 25Mbps up, while Siti broadband is a DOCSIS connection with ~60Mbps down and 25Mbps up.