canard's vpn misadventures

the beninging

so this wonderful experience of mine begins a little while ago, longer than you'd reckon - russia starts blocking services and sites, and vice versa - half the world starts blocking russia.

but we have to make do somehow, right? so we start using free vpns and suffering from how slow they are. and we cope for a few years like this.

and then a friend of mine does something cool - he buys a server online and hosts his own vpn on there! but canard, you might say, isnt that dumb? cant you just pay for an existing vpn?

yes. yes you can. yes it is. but for whatever reason - it wasn't up to snuff for us. maybe it was the companies handling our data at their own discretion, maybe it was the unreliable speeds and servers... or maybe it was classic weaponised autism, and we just really wanted to do something of our own. its irrelevant. what matters is that a friend of mine ended up doing it anyway.

so ffw to yesterday - i've had it with these free VPNs of yesteryear. and i made the decision to make my own self-hosted vpn. i boot up chatgpt ((oof, cringe?)) an start asking the lad questions

the purchas

so it turns out my friend... used a rented server, on which he mounted a self-hosted vpn service. doesnt sound too bad, or too difficult, i thought. i start askin ma boy gpt how to do this???

and so it offers me a handful of services that let you rent servers. and one of em seems good, and i used them to host a site at once point. so i give it a shot. turns out - it doesnt have the location i want. damn

some moeny down the drain. ((gpt also backpedaled cus it told me the site offered european locations... DAMN...)) okay, i can cope with that, i suppose - so i try another service, and it has a euro location!

i buy it (the price is bearable) and GET TO WORK.

the hackening

so i ssh into the motherbricker and try to install wireguard. looks like it works, and it gets me connected to the server. but then oh woe me - no internet, and the server doesnt respond to pings... no good.

well, after a few (f i v e) long hours debugging, it turned out that it wasnt even my fault. everything was set up fine, its just that my isp was doing deep packet inspection and tossing my packets bc they looked like i was using a vpn

which i was. so i look for a solution and lo and behold - amneziaWG comes along, and i get to install everything from just one simple click :) it does everything for you...