Modern Rube Goldberg

So my previous posting and the ensuing research made me realize just how much I over thought my plans to have a little bit of fun with a site-to-site network when I could just do a software-defined overlay network and it would vastly simplify things. Instead of doing things like trying to connect a physical machine to a virtual network and routing everything through a VPS in a convoluted, Rube Goldberg solution, I've come up with a much easier way.

All I really have to do is create what they call an overlay network which is one that basically rides on top of the internet instead of trying to do site-to-site VPN. An overlay network still makes use of tunnels but they are more point-to-point rather than site-to-site. So on my VPS all I have to do is configure a WireGuard interface with the address of 100.64.0.1/24. Then each machine that wants to be a part of this network connects to the VPS via WireGuard as well and wango-bango, we've an overlay network with no routing/switching problems.

I don't know why I didn't think of doing this before. The solution I came up with, while interesting, has too many points of failure and would suffer from performance issues. There are fewer points to go wrong and if I wanted to go just a little bit crazy, I could probably build in some redundancy but this is just for a little bit of fun and nothing mission critical will be happening. In likelihood, we're just going to share files and maybe do our own streaming of music and movies.