XRay

Concepts

• XRay is an advanced VPN with a focus on bypassing Internet censorship.
• It's a good VPN solution for countries with Internet restrictions.
• You must install the classic pair of client and server.
• For clients, V2rayN is a good choice for desktop OSes (Linux, Windows). For Android, V2rayTun on the Google store is fine.
• For servers, the 3x-ui docker image (bundling the server / proxy component with a web interface) is what I used.

Setting up the server

• Clone this repository: https://github.com/MHSanaei/3x-ui. As explained, this is a web interface also containing the server part, in a self-contained Docker image.
• Run inside the directory: docker compose up -d
• The default port for the web interface is 2053, and login/password is admin/admin. It's HTTP by default, not HTTPs.
• Important note: the interface only listens on IPv6. It will not work on a computer that only has IPv4 and tries to connect via IPv4.
• It's easy to create a vless configuration on the web interface. Every setting can be left to default; for the security part I chose Reality, and you need to generate a public key / private key.
• The port for the interface AND the port for the vless configuration (for instance, 4443) both need to be opened if you have a firewall. For Rocky Linux 9.3:

firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=2053/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=4443/tcp
firewall-cmd --reload

Setting up the client

System Proxy

• You must choose "Set system proxy" in v2rayN interface (select box). This will then set the system proxy for your desktop environment (KDE). Many applications rely on this setting, for instance browsers (Chromium, Brave, Firefox). These applications will work instantly with the vless VPN as soon as you activate the system proxy in v2rayN.
• Note that for the system proxy, you can run v2rayN as a normal user (actually, I use the AppImage version of v2rayN that cannot be ran as root).
• For the configuration part it's super easy; just copy the vless link from the 3x-ui interface into the client. It looks like:

vless://7ef83dc3-79ab-4169-8a58-54d382bef4ee@valmar.elvanor.net:PORTNUMBER?type=tcp&security=reality&pbk=PUBLICKEY&fp=chrome&sni=www.bing.com&sid=7db81f&spx=%2F#valmar-elvanor