<div dir="ltr">I think it would be brilliant to see an guide setting up a server on a OpenWRT router, and then setting up a Mac laptop as a roaming client that could connect to the network as required. Unfortunately I do not have much time to help with this, but I believe that this would be a very common use case.<div><br></div><div>Cheers,</div><div>Paul</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 6:53 AM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dkg@fifthhorseman.net" target="_blank">dkg@fifthhorseman.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi all--<br>
<span class=""><br>
On Wed 2017-02-15 09:05:29 -0500, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:<br>
> As WireGuard gets more and more popular, I have more people contacting<br>
> me about novice guides and blog entries and step by step things. If<br>
> anybody would be up for writing these or assisting with it, it would<br>
> be much appreciated. Probably better to tackle this before horribly<br>
> written guides with bad advice fill the void instead.<br>
<br>
</span>Agreed about wanting better-written guides to pre-empt terrible ones :)<br>
<br>
A good "novice guide" usually has the following pattern:<br>
<br>
a) Present the specific goal of the guide at a high level (if you think<br>
want X, this is the guide for you) -- the goal should not be<br>
"install WireGuard", which is meaningless to a novice, but something<br>
like one of the following:<br>
<br>
* have two machines establish a secure connection between each other<br>
across the public Internet<br>
<br>
* give my laptop an IP address on my home network no matter where I am<br>
<br>
* allow co-workers to access office resources from the road<br>
<br>
* run a "virtual office" offering secure connections between the<br>
computers of multiple co-workers who are scattered and have no<br>
central physical location<br>
<br>
* operate a public-facing encrypted Internet proxy service<br>
(a.k.a. "VPN provider")<br>
<br>
b) Present frequently-confused *non* use cases (if you think you want<br>
these other things, this is not your guide)<br>
<br>
c) Document assumed platform details (if your examples are only known to<br>
work on Ubuntu 16.10, say so!)<br>
<br>
d) Document steps to take to achieve the goal (these should be very<br>
simple. If it's more than 5 steps, the tools or the platform should<br>
probably be improved)<br>
<br>
e) Diagnostics, troubleshooting and debugging (again, should be<br>
relatively minimal, but should include at least how to check that<br>
things are working, what you might see if they're not working, and<br>
recovery from common failure modes)<br>
<br>
f) Outbound links to learn more (this should include suggestions about<br>
where to file bug reports, and how to follow up on this mailing list)<br>
<br>
<br>
choosing (a) and (c) carefully are kind of critical for even knowing<br>
where to begin if you want to write such a guide for novices.<br>
<br>
Those of us who are not novices understand that tools like WireGuard can<br>
be used on a lot of different platforms (c) to perform a lot of<br>
different tasks (a), but how those tasks are carried out might have more<br>
to do with policy details (where do you get the peer's public keys from?<br>
how do you verify that they're the right public keys? How do peers find<br>
each other if there are no stable public IP addresses? How do you<br>
allocate IP addresses for the wg interfaces? Which traffic should each<br>
peer route over which wg interfaces?) than with WireGuard itself.<br>
<br>
The fact that the WireGuard-specific instructions for any such guide are<br>
likely to be minimal is one of the strengths of WireGuard, i think. But<br>
that also means that any novice guide is going to be at least as much<br>
about non-WireGuard details as it is about WireGuard itself.<br>
<br>
Jason, what kinds of novice guides are people asking for? What kinds of<br>
guides are people on this list interested in writing?<br>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
--dkg<br>
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<br></blockquote></div><br></div>