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Comment by minhazm | Hacker News Reader

Outline[1] is significantly easier to use. They have out of the box support for AWS, GCP and Digital Ocean. You can have your own VPN setup on digital ocean for $5 a month, and you can generate keys and share the VPN with friends/family who then only need to download the Outline app on their device. I have zero affiliation with outline but it's an incredibly useful tool, I was looking to build something similar when I discovered it.

[1] http://getoutline.org

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Is this a script to set up a cloud provider box as a VPN to tunnel your traffic through, or something else?

Outline is part of Jigsaw, which is a part of Google. Is it truly private?[0][1]

[0]: https://getoutline.org/faq/ under the "Outline Brand" section

[1]: https://github.com/Jigsaw-Code/?q=outline Jigsaw's Github with the Google affiliation.

It's private in that it's your own VM you're running the VPN on. No one else has access to it. Whether you trust Google or not, it's all open source[1].

[1] https://github.com/Jigsaw-Code/outline-server

perhaps easier to setup, but not in use and a single exit point. the setup given allows to easily scale into other regions. also, authentication is done using tailscale, so no sharing if config or keys. just invite them to your tailnet of share the server to their tailnet.

It's also very easy to use, it's just a normal VPN. You open the app and hit connect and you're connected. Outline is also very easy to add new regions to, you can deploy a VPN anywhere AWS, GCP, or Digital Ocean have data centers in, and you can use the one liner install script to install it in other cloud providers.

Tailscale is cool for sure but it also requires a third party involved in this. Outline has no third party server component. For almost everyone Outline is much easier to setup and use.

> so no sharing if config or keys. just invite them to your tailnet of share the server to their tailnet.

It's the same level of effort as outline. Outline manager has a button that generates an invite that someone else just puts into the outline client and now they have access to your VPN. You can revoke keys and do all the things you'd expect to be able to do, but again with no third party involved.

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