
It tries to avoid keep alive handshakes if they're not needed. The client sends its request and then shuts up.
Low overhead -> Better Battery Life- WireGuard, as described by its developer, isn't a chatty protocol. It allows you secure access to your homelab in the event that something happens and you need to remote in. Redundancy- As I have spoken about in the past, a VPN is an essential component of the Unattended Server Checklist. VPNs allow you to minimize your network's attack surfaces to a single (very secure) port forward for the VPN server. Do this enough times and the firewall that separates your home network from the internet starts to look like swiss cheese with all of the holes you've punched through it with those port forwards. If you don't utilize a VPN, then you have to port forward to make your Unraid homelab's local resources available over the internet. In doing so, this allows you to access all of your network's resources locally. Security- A VPN makes your remote laptop just another device on the network, just as if you were at home. With WireGuard, we're talking 15 minutes tops, assuming you have the prerequisite dynamic DNS already set up (if not, add maybe another 30 minutes). Even with all of the great guides available, you still have to know what you're doing. This stands in stark contrast to deploying the OpenVPN Docker container which, while certainly faster than deploying an OpenVPN server from scratch, still takes some effort. Rapid VPN Deployment- If you're new to Unraid or haven't otherwise deployed a VPN, the biggest reason to implement WireGuard is that it's extremely fast to deploy. In short, WireGuard is a lightweight VPN server/client embedded in the Linux kernel. From those of us new to homelabs to those of us with advanced setups, I am of course talking about WireGuard®. Unraid 6.8 was recently released and one of the main new features is a game changer for us all. OPENVPN UNRAID SETUP SOFTWARE
He uses it as network-attached storage for various hardware and software development projects. This guest blog is by TorqueWrench of the Engineer's Workshop who has been using Unraid since 2017.