Hello comrades! In light of the fucked up state of the UK govt I’m looking at some VPN options to further harden my homelab.

Right now, I have zero VPN coverage for my seedbox/jellyfin server which of course means a major security hole, even if my ISP hasn’t shit over me for it yet.

I had a few questions about selfhosting a VPN versus a third party service.

  1. How does a self hosted VPN actually do anything? I was under the impression that VPNs had to be off-site to give the benefits of, say, location spoofing.

  2. Do I need to pay any subscriptions to other services for a self hosted VPN? At least in order to access features such as location spoofing.

  3. We use Cloudflare WARP at work to access internal services. Will a LAN-VPN Fuck this up even if I explicitly avoid spoofing my location to ensure my IT guy doesnt shit a brick?

thanks cumrades!

  • dead [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    A self-hosted VPN would mean that you rent a server, install a VPN server software on the server, and then route your traffic through that server. The benefit of having self hosted VPN is that you would have more bandwidth. Typically, VPN companies will allocate 30-40 users to a single VPN server, so you get a fraction of the bandwidth. Also, your server will have a dedicated IP address, which could be good or bad depending on your needs.

    If your goal is to bypass the UK govt firewall, a self-hosted VPN is fine. Renting a server requires that you provide ID, most times. If you commit any severe crimes (hacking, etc), the server company could be subpoenaed for your information. You probably shouldn’t use a self hosted VPN with public torrents. I’ve heard that people commonly use self-hosted VPNs with private torrents, without problem.