For those who want to use a VPN, but don't want to pay for it as a service because of all the arcane issues that can come with it, and of course have some hardw

For those who want to use a VPN, but don't want to pay for it as a service because of all the arcane issues that can come with it, and of course have some hardware laying around, I recommend using StrongSwan (https://www.strongswan.org/ https://www.strongswan.org/) + Stunnel (https://www.stunnel.org/index.html https://www.stunnel.org/index.html) instead of openVPN Why strongswan? Because setting up a VPN properly, and securely (thats very important) is hard! and I feel, personally, that openVPN is alot for people to take in. I know it was for me, and I'm not ill experienced. Strongswan is also open source, and they have a lot of very good documentation including cryptographically verified 'plug n play' (mostly) setups: https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/UsableExamples https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/UsableE... While I'm at it, they have a wonderful entry on their wiki with security recommendations: https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/SecurityRecommendations https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/Securit... From just my experience, and dealing with the community, and from what I understand from others much more educated in these matters, their usable configurations are indeed very good. Strongswan of course supports pre-shared key authentication and certificate authentication in lieu of username/password. They also can take advantage of CA-certs for encrypting your conversations over SSL/TLS (think: letsencrypt!) It also has the latest versions available, you can install on routers that support openWRT, lede-project.org and I believe DD-WRT has this as an option? I couldn't say for sure. Why do I recommend stunnel though if it can use a valid CA ssl cert on its own? Mostly because Stunnel can re-direct any traffic over SSL (I recommend you do this wherever you can, stunnel is insanely useful for just this basic encryption traffic, because you can make ANYTHING run over SSL with it) and its insanely simple to setup, where as setting it up with strongswan as one its modules is a little more complicated. Also, stunnel will redirect your traffic based on ports. So you can have stunnel listen on 443 and route the traffic to whatever port you are running your VPN service on. This gets around potential blocks on say, corporate networks, or public wifi, or even just ISP snoopage. I feel like paying for a VPN if you don't have to is a waste compared to having your own. OWN YOUR TRAFFIC! Its the only way to ensure any semblance of privacy.