All posts by Jonathan Duncan - Operations Engineer

I was given the task of setting up a tinc VPN so that we could test performance for comparison against other VPN systems. This task took much longer than it should have. For that reason I am making this post to help myself and others remember how to do it again in the future. ---------- Installing tinc is straightforward enough. You can download the latest release and build it, or install from your favorite package manager. The configuration for tinc lives in /etc/tinc. The configuration is what seems to be the hard part of getting tinc to work.

Not every server is made equally. On dedicated servers the hardware varies widely. On virtual and cloud servers the resource allocations also vary widely. Some servers are CPU optimized for maximum computing power. Others focus on having a lot of memory. Some servers are built to have a good balance of all system resources. Hardware aside, we require many differing tasks of our servers. Some applications are processor hungry, some need large amounts of disk space, while others take up a lot of memory.