pivpn VS dnscrypt-proxy

PiVPN for classic VPN software https://pivpn.io - Wireguard would be my choice

Linux retropie 5.10.103-v7l+ #1529 SMP Tue Mar 8 12:24:00 GMT 2022 armv7l GNU/Linux

Wondering what people are using these days to get a VPN (Wireguard?) up and running easily. Is Wireguard itself simple enough that one can just ... do this? I'm thinking of something like PiVPN which does appear to still exist but I'm unsure of how up-to-date it is. Specifically, I like terminal commands just fine, but would prefer not to have to manually configure a basic VPN (internet gateway) and its associated profiles/certificates.

A real simple way is pivpn in a vm. Super easy to set up and manage users. https://github.com/pivpn/pivpn

They're easily set up via the guided PiVPN installation script. Should work on everything that's Debian-based, not just on Rasbian running on a Pi.

under Features in [1]:

* Doesn't need to be a Raspberry Pi™, It runs on any x86_64 system

[1] https://pivpn.io/

There is more than one way to do this but I have decided to use dnscrypt-proxy. We will not be using dnscrypt for the dnscrypt protocol though you could elect to use that as the underlying DNS protocol. dnscrypt-proxy lets's us use a SOCKS5 proxy through which the DNS queries will be sent. We will use a Tor SOCKS5 proxy here. You can choose which protocols should be enabled and which ones should be disabled. There are two points:

I tried installing the RPM from the Fedora repos but it's out-of-date and there were no instructions on how to get it operational, so I went with the manual approach as per their wiki: https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Installation-linux

This is awesome, thanks -- going to look into that now. I found SmartDNS interesting and thought I would share it, it's pretty simple to setup. I can see why it's Chinese focused, they have "interesting" internet access over there :-).

I have been looking into DNS quite a bit lately (Unbound, etc), as DNS lookup performance has been pretty subpar lately. I'm in Perth, Australia, and we're pretty remote so our latency is meh at best, and Cloudflare performance has been all over the shop lately, I think they're having issues in WA). DNS can also cause really routing issues here sometimes as we get better latency to Singapore than Sydney, so we might get shunted off to SG.

I've also been using dnscrypt-proxy2 (https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy) for a while, but the above issues with Cloudflares DNS is what triggered me to look into other options.

I use a min-cache-ttl of 15 minutes, which seems to work well.

Thank you for sharing this tip about, looking into this now :).

Sure. I run dnscrypt_proxy behind a pihole. https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy