Wireguard

Overview

Wireguard is modern, low-latency VPN, available in upstream Alpine repo. Not only it is fast and secure, but also very simple and straightforward in configuration. Among all VPN techlologies, it is the simplest (from user's viewpoint) and the least wayward one.

Setup and usage

As of pmOS 23.06, the default kernel is already built with Wireguard support. To use Wireguard tunnels, you only need to install the wireguard-tools-wg-quick package. There is no separate wireguard package in Alpine and pmOS. There are other Wireguard tools to be considered as well.

Standard location for configuration of Wireguard tunnels is /etc/wireguard/interface.conf. The directory should be readable for root only (chmod 700, and chmod 600 for files in it) as it contains private keys of the host. Once wg-quick is installed, tunnels may be started/stopped as follows:

$ sudo wg-quick up INTERFACE
$ sudo wg-quick down INTERFACE

with INTERFACE being a name of one of the .conf files.

Integration with other applications

GUI applications

As of now, there is no dedicated GUI application for Wireguard management in Linux. (Unlike the other OSes.) Use terminal instead. Probably someone will write it one day, or adopt the existing Android/IOS app for pmOS phones (apart from desktops/notebooks). In some desktop environments, there are (or may appear in the future) Wireguard plugins for their regular network management tools.

NetworkManger integration

In mobian there is easy way to manage Wireguard with automatically filled pre and post hooks.

$ nmcli connection import type Wireguard file /path/to/wg.conf

However, because of (probably) some lack in packaging, pre and post hooks interfaces are not set properly. So you are connected to your rely but DNS doesn't work. In other cases, Wireguard support may vary depending upon distribution, its particular NM version and plugin availabilty for it.

DNS dependence

In certain use cases, you may need to use a particular DNS server at the other side of the tunnel instead the default one. To that purpose, there is the DNS= setting in config file for wg-quick. (But not for wireguard itself !)

To perform the task, wg-quick and probably other tools running on top of Wireguard itself need addtitional tools to set up DNS for wireguard interface. In most distributions and packages, openresolv|resolvconf are listed as recommended - but not mandatory - dependencies.

In Alpine and pmOS, wireguard-tools-wg-quick does install openresolv unconditionally, thus DNS setting works out of the box.

In other distributions and setups (including Network Manager as described above?) you may need to install this dependence manually.