[General Questions and Answers] Mumblefratz:
A couple of weeks ago I posted a question about how to implement a VPN Server on my home system. I had read https://www.howtogeek.com/66438/how-to-easily-access-your-home-network-from-anywhere/ about the potential benefits of having your own private VPN Server(s) on your home system wifi router.

I was hoping to find someone that had done this themselves and could help me avoid the inevitable pitfalls. What I got was a recommendation for a paid VPN service and someone that basically mirrored what I had read about using your home system's wifi router as a VPN Server.

So while I didn't get the easy answer I was hoping for, I did at least get someone else agreeing that I "should" be able to setup a VPN Server on my wifi router and it "should" allow me to seem to be originating from the IP address dynamically assigned to me by my ISP.

Ultimately the best way to see if this works is to go ahead and do it. So that's what I decided to do.

My ISP had just informed me that my old router was limiting my bandwidth and I needed to replace it anyway so I just made sure it supported VPN Server as well.

I purchased an Asus RT-AX86U_Pro. While I'm sure there are many other routers as good or better than the RT-AX86U_Pro, it's readily available, supports a minimum of 1 Gbps, and, provides OpenVPN, WireGuard VPN and IPsec IKEv2 VPN Servers.

I setup the three VPN Servers using the following FAQ's.

Asus OpenVPN Server setup FAQ.

Asus Wireguard Server setup FAQ.

Asus IPsec VPN Server setup FAQ.

The router manufacturer's setup FAQ's were easy enough to follow and the three VPN Servers (OpenVPN, WireGuard and IPsec IKEv2) functioned pretty much as promised. The one downside is you have to figure out the correct android VPN client app for each of the 3 protocols yourself, although it was easy enough to figure out.

In the case of OpenVPN I used 2 separate Android client apps with differing amounts of VPN bandwidth degradation, OpenVPN Connect and OpenVPN for Android. For WireGuard VPN the only Android client app I found was WireGuard. Note that while the directions given in the OpenVPN and WireGuard VPN FAQ's worked perfectly, I was unable to setup strongSwan, the IPsec IKEv2 VPN client app. However, I was able to setup the IPsec IKEv2 VPN using native Android functionality in Settings. The IPsec IKEv2 VPN can then be controlled through Settings > Connections > More connection settings > VPN.

The bottom line is that I was 100% successful in setting up OpenVPN, WireGuard and IPsec IKEv2 Servers on my Asus RT-AX86U_Pro router and they did allow me to connect to my home system safely from anywhere as promised in addition to the normal security benefits of using a VPN.

You can also attach a USB drive to the wifi router which can be setup as a Network (Samba) Share and accessed as a "cloud disk" to provide your own private cloud server.

The final issue is that enabling pretty much any VPN degrades your bandwidth dependent on VPN Server bandwidth and load, among other things. There's a fair amount of variation but over multiple tests my ISP's usual download bandwidth is about 500 Mbps. With IPsec IKEv2 enabled it's about 350 Mbps. With WireGuard VPN it's about 200 Mbps and about 75 Mbps for OpenVPN. Even 75 Mbps for OpenVPN is fast enough to do anything you want, the problem is that sometimes I'm on a 175 Mbps network in which case all these speeds scale accordingly and OpenVPN can become unusable. Also when accessing 5G cellular data I may only get 20 Mbps (or less) and only IPsec IKEv2 is usable.

In retrospect I could have saved some effort by just setting up IPsec IKEv2, but otherwise it was well worth the effort to have my own private VPN server and cloud server.