ANSWERED Multiple wireguard instances on same machine

[M1lw4uk33 2]

Hello, I am attempting to run 3 wireguard VPNs on the same machine. Linux user here. I have generated the configs and everything works as expected (with port forwarding, etc.) when I bring up 1 VPN, but things fall down when I bring up all 3 VPNs. I noticed they all get the same IP address (as specified in the generated configs).

I have tried running them on different wireguard ports (no change), and I am now wondering if the local interface address (as setup in the generated configs) can be edited  locally or if the AirVPN servers are only expecting that 1 address for all my (wireguard) connections.

Please advise if this should work, or what I have to do to get it to work.

Thanks

[SurprisedItWorks 52]

Short answer: use three different "VPN devices" (in the Client Area) when generating the three configs.

[M1lw4uk33 2]

Thanks. I have never noticed that section before. I guess I was running on the default. Let me try it ...

[M1lw4uk33 2]

Perfect! Your simple answer was the correct answer. All working now!

Thanks again.

[M1lw4uk33 2]

Might have been a bit premature. As soon as I bring up the 3 VPN instances, resolving on all my other apps (like browsers) fails with a cloudflare error. I am specifically trying to not make the VPNs used by default (I bind my BT clients directly to the interfaces), but for some reason it seems like the VPNs are getting used when they should not.

The odd thing is, I can't even go back to a single VPN now, which did work fine before.

[M1lw4uk33 2]

OK, it looks like I was getting a default gateway added by way of the wg-quick tool. I brought a test wg up manually from the cmd line and my browsers are able to resolve as expected. Guess I will need to study up on using wg manually ... unless anyone knows how to use the pre-generated configs (with wg-quick), but not have it add a default route to the table.

[M1lw4uk33 2]

You can prevent the routes from being added by adding 'Table = off' to the config you feed to wg-quick.

[M1lw4uk33 2]

A final note on this thread. It turns out the underlying cause of all the issues I was seeing was a IP address conflict. For some weird reason my router (Unifi Cloud Gateway Ultra) decided to move the fixed IP (Unifi's version of static) that I was using, to a completely different device on Wifi.

Odd since I had not made any config changes in months to the router and it seems like it spontaneously moved the IP override to the wrong device yesterday, which started this wild goose chase to diagnose and fix the assumed VPN issue after the Wifi device decided to renew and grab the same IP as I had assigned to the Ethernet that AirVPN was going out over. May be a bug in the Unifi, I don't know. 🙄

The exercise was still worth it though. Now I can have multiple VPN instances running locally to really saturate my upstream, and I also know for sure that Wireguard is much faster than OpenVPN. 😀