I want to set up a VPN that uses the client’s IP when sending data out of the VPN server. I am able to use either OpenVPN (open-source edition), or Wireguard.
Uh? Is this a thing? And, if it is, what’s the use case? Just curious…
Not necessarily. VPN can be used for that, but I’d be that more common use case is to access networks which are otherwise firewalled off from the public internet, like corporate LAN.
Right. That’s literally why it’s called a VPN - you’re connecting to a private network (LAN), virtually.
Not at all. A VPN can be used as a proxy but that’s not what they were intended for.
I do wonder about when VPNs started being used as proxies… Back when I was in school, we’d use HTTP proxies for HTTP, and SOCKS5 proxies for everything else. I remember I’d try searching for free web-based proxies too.
I guess VPNs being easier to configure and automatically applying to all apps (since they’re just networks that can have routing rules) helped.
I do wonder about when VPNs started being used as proxies…
About at the same time operators at the US noticed that they could profit from profiling users behaviour. In here that’s very much illegal thing to do and most use cases for VPN is to connect yourself into corporate network. VPNs are of course useful to protect you from MITM attacks at open wifi networks and things like that, but hiding your behavior from your ISP is very much an US thing.
It can be achieved with nat proxy on the server https://serverfault.com/questions/379360/vpn-tunneling-to-hide-real-ip-through-my-proxy-server-while-showing-the-clien
While I think you could techincally spoof your originating IP at the VPN server to match your clients IP it wouldn’t do anything useful. That’s not how IP routing works. What you’re trying to achieve with a setup like that?
