Quick-Review

Getting a self-hosted VPN up with a proper WireGuard setup usually means wrangling systemd services, firewall rules, and config files for half an afternoon. The hwdsl2/wireguard-install script changes that — one command, five minutes, you’re done. And it comes from the same developer behind the 28,000+ star IPsec/L2TP VPN server installer. What It Does This is a Bash-based VPN server installer that automates the entire WireGuard deployment on Linux. Run it once and it handles kernel module checks, package installation, firewall configuration (iptables/nftables), and client profile generation. Plus, it spits out a QR code so you can import the config into the WireGuard mobile app without touching a text editor. ...

Disclosure: Some links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Most DNS ad-blockers fall into two camps: the heavyweight (Pi-hole with its web dashboard, PHP backend, and dependency on FTL) and the bare-bones (a single hosts file slapped into dnsmasq). Blocky sits in that sweet spot between them — a Go binary, a single config file, and DNS blocking that supports DoH, DoT, DoQ, and DoH3 out of the box. ...

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. ...

Sure, WireGuard is easy to set up — two key pairs, a config file, and wg-quick up gets you a tunnel in under a minute. But managing multiple clients? Adding a phone, a laptop, a travel router, revoking access — that’s where the friction lives. You end up manually editing configs, generating keys, bumping IPs in the address range. For a 5-device road warrior setup, it’s doable but tedious. But anything bigger than a handful of devices? Total headache. ...

ExpressVPN still unblocks Netflix US on the first try. It still runs on RAM-only servers confirmed by annual PwC audits. And it still belongs to Kape Technologies — the company whose predecessor built adware that landed on millions of machines. Yet all three statements are true at the same time. And that tension is what makes an ExpressVPN review in 2026 different from a ProtonVPN review or a Mullvad review. ...

You’ve got a laptop, a desktop, a NAS in the closet, and a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant. How do they all talk to each other securely — without opening ports, fighting with firewall rules, or renting a cloud server just to route traffic? Here’s the short answer: Tailscale makes this stupidly simple. It’s a zero-config mesh VPN built on WireGuard®, free for personal use (100 devices, 6 users), and it genuinely delivers on the “it just works” promise. ...