IPsec

Sure, WireGuard gets all the attention. OpenVPN has the legacy. But the most-starred VPN project on GitHub — 28,089 stars and counting — doesn’t use either protocol. It runs IPsec, and it’s been quietly maintained for ten years. Now, hwdsl2/setup-ipsec-vpn is a set of shell scripts that turn a fresh Linux server into a fully functional IPsec VPN in under five minutes. It supports IPsec/L2TP, Cisco IPsec, and IKEv2 — and the killer feature isn’t speed or crypto. It’s the fact that every device you own already has native clients for these protocols. ...

WireGuard is the talk of the self-hosted VPN world. Small kernel footprint, modern crypto, insane throughput — it deserves the hype. But there’s a catch: every device needs a WireGuard client app installed. And that’s where IPsec/IKEv2 comes in. It runs natively on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Chrome OS, and Linux — without installing anything extra. hwdsl2/setup-ipsec-vpn is a one-command script that sets up an IPsec VPN server in under three minutes. With 28,000+ GitHub stars and a decade of active maintenance, it’s the most battle-tested self-hosted VPN tool most people have never tried. ...