I've been running an OpenVPN server at home to protect my data traffic for quite some years now, first on an WRT54 Wi-Fi Router and later on a Raspberry Pi thanks to a great article over on ReadWrite. The solution I had so far has been limited to a maximum throughput of 5 Mbit/s as that was the uplink speed of my VDSL line at home. As we have a fiber FTTH line in Paris now with a maximum speed of 264 Mbit/s in the downlink direction and 48 Mbit/s in the uplink direction it was time to relocate my VPN service to that location to lift the 5 Mbit/s limit. It was really time for that as I easily surpass such speeds today while connected via UMTS and LTE. But it turns out the next road block is just around the corner.
And that next road block is the Raspberry Pi. Encryption and Decryption data must be quite computing intensive so the Raspberry Pi's processor is fully loaded at an encrypted line rate of around 10 Mbit/s. Twice as much as I had before but still far from what the fiber line offers. So I decided to move to a Banana Pi with it's much stronger processor. At around €40 without casing it only costs 10 euros more than a Raspberry Pi. And as it turns out the processor can shuffle encrypted OpenVPN data through the Ethernet Interface at a rate of 30 Mbit/s. Not quite the line rate of the FTTH connection but it's not too bad either and to go further I would have to put an Intel NUC or other high power CPU device in place which would cost much more. So the price / value balance of the Banana Pi seems quite right to me, at least for now.
Next on my list of things to do is to make the Banana Pi work as a OpenVPN Client Gateway and Wi-Fi Access Point. I use a Raspberry Pi today today to bundle the data traffic of all my devices while I'm traveling through a single VPN tunnel to my VPN Gateway which is, not surprisingly, also limited to 10 Mbit/s. All the scripts for configuring a Raspberry Pi are on GitHub but I'm running Ubuntu on the BananaPi so some of the things need to be tweaked.
Quite interesting. Your next project should be made easier with the release of the new banana pro card including wifi chip on board