Great router for wireless connection that lets you use many different networks and even a secure tunnel called a VPN.
Great router for wireless connection that lets you use many different networks and even a secure tunnel called a VPN.
Hi Guys This might be a pretty confusing question, but I'm looking for a home office setup where I can connect to different networks at the same time. Clients need their own network, and they might want to use a VPN. Ideally, just changing the network would automatically make my computer connected to the client's VPN. Some routers let you install a VPN on the router itself. What do you recommend for this? I'm thinking of having up to 4 networks off one single router: two separate networks with their own VPNs installed that work automatically, a normal WiFi network without any security stuff, and maybe a guest network. Am I crazy or is this possible without needing to know all the technical details from start to finish? It definitely doesn't seem like it costs thousands of pounds or takes weeks to figure out. Hope I wasn't being weird here 😂🙈
Your best choice is an Asus router running Merlin firmware. You could also look at another router that uses third-party firmware like dd-wrt. I should check if the Asus router has a CPU that supports AES acceleration instructions. I don't remember the exact model, but they usually run around 1.8GHz. Last time I checked, those CPUs aren't used in their newest models. The issue is: without the AES accelerator, consumer routers only reach about 30Mbps. With the CPU's AES instructions, they can hit 200Mbps using OpenVPN or WireGuard gets even better. Most other firmware on non-Merlin routers doesn't support these speed boosts, and I haven't seen this feature on routers from other brands that use the same chip as Asus. Merlin is your best bet here. I know it can handle multiple VPNs at once, connect to several ISPs, and direct some clients through one path while others go another way. But I don't know if you can do exactly what you want. It lets you change settings with commands instead of the GUI, so it should work fine on a Linux router using the right IPTABLES rules. The GUI just edits those files anyway. Now, since your budget is low, use a small PC with at least three Ethernet ports: two WAN and one LAN. You can run a popular Linux firewall or router program. These tools can probably do what you need; it just depends on how complex the setup is. You can manually set up IPTABLES, but that's hard to understand. Getting a massively better VPN performance on your PC makes sense because the CPU is much stronger and modern CPUs support AES instructions. The main thing to watch for: don't count the number of cores, but rather the clock speed of each core. Routing and VPN work best when running in single-threaded mode, so only one core does all the heavy lifting.
You can get a small laptop computer around $200 and handle it easily. figuring out how to put everything together might take some time. I have a pretty good setup like this one. I run Proxmox with virtual machines for each vpn, and those sit inside pfsense on my local lan side and another router at my edge. I use dynamic rules so that whatever I need goes into the vpn it needs to go. all traffic from x client to vpn1, traffic to y destination goes to vpn2, etc. I nest my routers so all traffic from my clients are going through my firewall rules before hitting the vpn. if you setup the vpn using pfsense it also does this without the need for it. I prefer to have dedicated vms. if you can get all your vms setup in the pfSense gui it will handle a lot of routing for you. like bill mentioned openvpn has speed limitations. wg does not. my upload is <200Mbs so I use openvpn since it's hardware offloaded with aes-ni and using the correct cipher. you need an intel cpu on both sides for that. amd has something too but named different.