Have been using Google VPN on my home network for awhile because I like free things (comes with our Google One subscription level). I have a need to install a vpn tunnel service & WireGuard was suggested by a family member that has used it for a few years. I’ve downloaded the service & installed it (following the instructions here: https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/wireguard-windows-setup/), I have a Spectrum network with their router & have created the port forwards and although both the server (on desktop) and client (on laptop) appear to be running properly as determined by log entries they are not connecting. I can’t find any docs describing interaction between the Google VPN & WG, so I’m wondering if these two are incompatible. Appreciate any advice.
A VPN, seen from the point of view of the operating system, is just a virtual network adapter. It behaves just like a regular, physical network adapter. So, in principle, whatever you can do with one, you can do with the other. That said, you can create a Wireguard tunnel nested inside another tunnel, which seems to be what you want to do. But you have to properly set up routing, otherwise all connections intended to go to your Wireguard peers will end up being sent through the other VPN, which has no possible path to reach them. The routing part is usually what goes wrong in this kind of setup.
Unless there is an explicit blocking in place for some sort of network traffic, there is no such thing as a VPN incompatible with another one. Just misconfigured routing tables.
So what are you trying to accomplish with a wireguard VPN? Fixing a specific problem is easier than diagnosing a vague situation.
Don’t know whether the answers depend on it, but I neglected to mention that I am doing this work on Windows 11 machings.
The Google VPN does not support tunneling; I will be remote from my house for a bit and need to access resources there while I’m away. WireGuard provides a tunneling protocol and is an appropriate solution for my problem.
I have disabled the Google VPN on the relevant machines and have been able to get some expected responses from the client (that is, when I ping the server I see the pings get generated in the client log), but am still not able to connect to the server (no evidence of connection in the server log). Pings from the client to the endpoint (my router) succeed, but are logged as failures. And again, no evidence of connection on the server logs.
I’ve answered my initial question (Google VPN seems to be interfering) but still don’t have a working tunnel. Continuing to look at stuff.