pivpn is an amazing service to host, since it is a jump server or vpn server to my home network. the setup is fairly simple and the developers created an install bash script, so it was easy. i installed it on an lxc container using debian bookworm and ran the script. configuration was very easy and i am using a wireguard server. port fowarding is required, but i just used a different port than the default wireguard port (51820). there is a kicker with this service, and that is the masquerading with nat and forwarding. by doing a pivpn -d, it fixes those problems but they can persist after reboots. i found a fix to save the configuration using sudo iptables-save and then disabling the service. since forums were reporting that it goes to the defaults at boot because it is not persistent or something.

my inspiration for this came from jeff geerling, he made an excellent video outlining his use case and the setup process.