I see this so often and nobody ever seems to realize that local/home VPNs use upload bandwidth, which for some is in dire low supply. I can’t have 4 full-time users using my upload connection routing through wireguard, when all 4 stream videos throughout the day. And that’s just 3rd party services like YouTube and Twitch, not plex. Then you add in two additional, off-site users who want to watch something with me on plex, and we are all given ~1.5 megabits a piece of a 10meg upload pipe over here. Mmmm, crispy pixels. ‘you can just use some IPs in wg so you don’t need to tunnel all data, just what you need’, they say, and I rebuke by showing them my dynamic IP address. ‘ask for a static one’ and they haven’t offered that for years besides enterprise customers.
And that’s before I ask everyone ‘so everyone download wireguard and scan your individual qr code, or I will send you the config file’ and everyone but a single user just hears the ocean. Then I need to teach them about VPNs, why we use it, why plex doesn’t work when the little lock isn’t showing on their phones, why ‘I had the lock in the corner but I couldn’t make a call or get online, so we are all getting [thing you don’t like] for dinner since I couldn’t ask’. Then I have to troubleshoot and tell them to toggle it off and on again…
The we get to the bit where they try to cast to the TV, and the chromecast is like ‘lol wtf is a VPN’ and we are back at square one, everyone hates me, I hate everyone right back, all changes from this experiment get reverted, and I lose credibility.
VPNs are useful, but I rage at people who assume they are a blanket solution for all situations and use-cases. And often, the people suggesting them are smug, like they have found something that nobody knows about and are superior because their situation doesn’t color outside of the lines.
Damn that was nice to vent. Been bothering me for way too damn long.
You didn’t read anything I said, I see