Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

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I think that it would be hard for WireGuard to take over the VPN world. IPsec works virtually everywhere without any additional software. OpenVPN is easier to setup and have many mature clients for every platform, so if you require custom software, why would anyone choose something new, when you have proven and popular OpenVPN. I'm sure that WireGuard has some advantages, but I'm still skeptical.

That said, IPsec is astonishingly hard to setup and diagnose. Recently I installed strongswan on my server and Windows 10 is my client. I didn't figure out how to send intermediate letsencrypt certificate to Windows 10, it wasn't accepting connections without installing intermediate certificate as trusted and I tried very hard, I'm sure that strongswan configuration is correct (I put intermediate certificates into cacerts and it works on macOS). It's especially fun with very little and cryptic information from Windows 10. Now when connection was finally established, routes were not set properly. It turned out that configuring connection via GUI was not enough, I had to change some connection property via powershell script, so client would receive routes from server. Yes, VPN isn't very easy to setup, at least for casual use. But in the end it worked and I don't see any reason to switch.

OpenVPN is easier to setup than what exactly?

I found OpenVPN to just feel VERY VERY clunky. The clients look ugly and unpolished. Before anyone says that's superficial, I do think it shows a lack of attention to detail. Setting up the server also wasn't terribly easy (it wasn't too hard either for someone like me who's used Linux for many years).

I think most of OpenVPN's value has come from the fact that it's the last difficult of solutions to implement.

For the record, I wasn't claiming that WireGuard was this easy to setup. But I think the mentality of WireGuard is simplicity. I think it's only a matter of time before someone DOES implement a single click client/server with it.

Right now I use Algo, which is just an excellent set of scripts used to setup VPN servers. This way I don't have to use OpenVPN, and I can actually use IPSec with built-in OS clients.

Update: Also I'd like to add that WireGuard just feels like the kind of thing Apple would've implemented in their OS 10 years ago. But Apple today wouldn't. They just seem to be barely treading water in their MacOS group.

Some openvpn providers just give you a conf file that you import in your client, and that's all you need

You could do the same with wireguard, only the conf file would be about 6 lines of text. And you can understand the obvious purpose of each line.

> OpenVPN is easier to setup than what exactly?

Definitely it was easier than strongswan for me. Documentation is clear, a lot of guides, AFAIK there's a single implementation, so no interoperation quirks, logging is actually useful. Client setup is a single .ovpn file which contains everything and installed using double-click or similar method. I guess that setting up a custom CA is the hardest part of setup and I just happen to work a lot with certificates, so it wasn't hard for me, everything else is as easy as any server software.

> I found OpenVPN to just feel VERY VERY clunky. The clients look ugly and unpolished.

I used paid software (Viscosity) for macOS, it was quite good IMO. I used official software for iOS, it worked without any problems. I'm not really sure what's ugly about VPN client, it's systems software, it should display icon in tray and allow to connect/disconnect, that's all. I remember that my friend had issues with OpenVPN official client on Windows laptop with hibernate, but I think he just had to restart connection, not that big of an issue.

> For the record, I wasn't claiming that WireGuard was this easy to setup. But I think the mentality of WireGuard is simplicity. I think it's only a matter of time before someone DOES implement a single click client/server with it. Right now I use Algo, which is just an excellent set of scripts used to setup VPN servers. This way I don't have to use OpenVPN, and I can actually use IPSec with built-in OS clients.

While I won't use any "single click" solutions unless I made them personally, I saw scripts which claim to install OpenVPN or IPsec automatically with absolutely minimal interaction. They had a lot of stars, so I guess they works. But if there's something that Wireguard could do better, that's good. It's still too hard for non-technical user to buy cheap VPS and setup his personal VPN with adequate security.

> The clients look ugly and unpolished.

Check out Viscosity. I've been a user for a few years now, it’s great stuff.

Seconded, it's a great client and the support from the devs is good.

Viscosity looks nice, has advanced features and can be scripted with AppleScript.

Having relied on both OpenVPN and IPSEC in the past, I can tell you that configuring WireGuard is several orders of magnitude simpler. It's outright easy (OpenVPN is difficult, IPSEC is a smoking pile of horsedung). Furthermore, with the intention of being mainlined (it is currently available as a DKMS-powered package), wireguard will end up being universally available in the Linux world (other platforms will for now rely on user-space implementations).

The availability of ipsec, much easier to configure than openvpn, better crypto, and flexibility that none of the existing options can match, such as full IP change resilience (as long as only one end change at a time) and connection persistence.

It makes you wonder why VPN's have been so bad for so long.

There are some useful tools for setting up your own VPN server - I like Streisand[1] (which includes Wireguard), and I have heard good things about Algo[2], though I haven't used it.

1: https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand

2: https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

I've used Algo and it's worked flawlessly for me.

Agree on IPsec being hard to setup. I would add to that that OpenVPN on windows has serious performance issues. It is hard to exceed 5 MB/s. I believe that issues only affects the windows implementation.

> IPsec is astonishingly hard to setup and diagnose

It often seems to me that networking people like things to be hard and obtuse. Almost everything in networking seems more complex than it needs to be.

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