Was given this little wintel box by a friend fairly recently, but I haven't yet even powered it on. I don't have a power cable for it unfortunately but when I do, what do you think I should do with it? What would you do with it?
I think it could potentially be just a basic lightweight desktop for web browsing and such, maybe a little smart tv box or something like that to replace the Chromecast I'm ashamed to admit I use, maybe run some basic self hosted stuff like pihole or home assistant? Could probably be a little emulation machine for retro games but I doubt it would be capable of much more than that. But I'm not sure there's too many ideas! I need suggestions people
Indeed but by doing so I can connect from the outside World too, e.g. if I'm at the dentist waiting for an appointment, I just connect to the VPN over my 5G connection, no login required.
You only need one VPN peering point inside your network. You do not need WG on other internal devices, just routing between intermediary subnet and LAN.
Am I misunderstanding your scenario?
I setup WireGuard only last week so maybe I'm the one who misunderstand something : on your LAN assuming you are NOT using your router (or switch, or a networking device) to be a peer of the VPN, don't you need to add each machine as a peer to the VPN? Also doesn't that leave the most granularity so that the (root) user of each machine can chose to be on/off and more, e.g. split tunneling?
What you're saying is true, however VPNs connect both hosts and subnets. If you have a VPN server on your subnet, you can easily allow any client that connects to it to have access to your LAN.
VPNs are simply networking over encrypted tunnels. What you do with that tunnel is up to you.