Is it safe to connect VPN to my home Wi-Fi?
Is it safe to connect VPN to my home Wi-Fi?
Hi everyone, I'm having a weird problem and need some help. My job at the company needs me to whitelist my home internet connection. When I travel abroad, how can I connect to a hotel's Wi-Fi so that it acts like my home network? I'd really prefer not using things like AWS virtual machines for this.
That sounds kind of strange to me. How does your company deal with home IP addresses changing? What do they say when someone uses an ISP that shares IPs with other customers? For example, if you use mobile broadband or connect your phone as a hotspot, your fixed IP might not stay the same. If we assume your IP doesn't change at all, it should be pretty easy right now. You can buy a router with a VPN server feature. This is much more common than just connecting to a dedicated client service. These tools let you access your home network from afar. I haven't checked every new release detail yet, but some older ones didn't even allow the connection back to the internet once inside the house. Just read the fine print; most probably can do this now. You could use third-party firmware like dd-wrt on a compatible router and that would work for sure. If you want something simpler, buy an Asus router with Merlin firmware. Now here is my real problem: how do I access your company network? If you use a VPN, then your PC will have two clients talking to different routers at the same time. The first talks to your home router, and the second talks to the company one. It gets complicated if you force the company software to use your home software as its main path. You would be better off buying another router in the hotel that has client function. Set up a VPN between those two routers, then connect your computer to the company one using your house router's connection. This is not an easy project and you will learn lots of things along the way. The company can still see that this isn't normal. Other people have asked similar questions too; you just cannot hide how much longer data takes to travel from another country. If they check their VPN server, it will be very clear your delay is higher than theirs. It also affects things like video calls a lot. Others might notice the extra lag and even hear echo in the audio because of it.
Thanks for getting back to me quickly! Our company changes their IP address by calling an on-call developer to add our IP to their whitelist. This is needed when ISPs share networks. We SSH into our servers so that they can do this. If someone who isn't in my team tries to use a mobile broadband provider or a phone hotspot, it won't work because of the current setup. That's why I'm asking for your advice on how to fix this issue. Just to be clear, my company runs 100% on AWS and does not need a company router so I don't need two VPNs. Something that could change my overseas/hotel IP to my house's static IP would work well here too. My video conference is all on Zoom so no worries there either. I plan to buy an Asus router with Merlin firmware as it seems like the cheapest option, but will this be the best way to solve it?
If it's just SSH, that's pretty simple. You put free OpenVPN software on your computer and connect it to your home router. Then you run regular SSH and it'll easily go through the VPN tunnel. I haven't actually done this for years, but Merlin seems updated so hopefully things get easier. Used to have sample guides over at smallnetworkbuilders forums where Merlin gets its support. The main worry is if your IP changes while you're gone who calls to say what the new one is. You'll need a service called DYNDNS to fix that. Most routers also allow this function. Just keep in mind performance isn't going to be high because of the router's CPU. You might get 20mbps because of the router, and your upload speed at home will limit how fast you download when using it remotely.
Ok this is way bigger then you think it is. I'm currently running my own VPN server at home to allow me to connect remotely from anywhere in the world and I highly recommend setting up a dedicated system at home to do this, SOHO router "vpn server" is terribad at the best of times. The trick is you need to redirect default gateway on the client device while also allowing IP masquerading of the new IP range. Also you'll need to generate some SSL key pairs to use for the server and client connections. Example of the server config for creating a VPN subnet on 10.10.1.1/24 and operating it as as switch. Read the documentation on how to install OpenVPN for the distro of your choice then enable port forwarding on it. Spoiler port 1194 proto udp dev tun0 cipher AES-256-GCM topology subnet server 10.10.1.0 255.255.255.0 tls-server persist-tun persist-key route-gateway 10.10.1.1 route 10.10.1.0 255.255.255.0 ca /etc/openvpn/server/keys/ca.crt cert /etc/openvpn/server/keys/vpnserver.crt key /etc/openvpn/server/keys/vpnserver.key dh /etc/openvpn/server/keys/dh2048.pem user nobody group nobody log-append /var/log/openvpn/server.log verb 3 mute 20 max-clients 24 tun-mtu 1500 mssfix 1350 keepalive 30 120 float daemon explicit-exit-notify 1 Client side config for connecting to that Spoiler client proto udp dev tun dev-node TAP1 #Name of the Virtual TAP adapter that gets installed in windows cipher AES-256-CBC tls-client ca "C:\\Program Files\\OpenVPN\\config\\ca.crt" cert "C:\\Program Files\\OpenVPN\\config\\client.crt" key "C:\\Program Files\\OpenVPN\\config\\client.key" resolv-retry infinite remote <home public IP or DNS name here> 1194 persist-key persist-tun topology subnet pull redirect-gateway def1 verb 3 mute 20 tun-mtu 1500 mssfix 1350 keepalive 30 120 float nobind Then on your home router you do a port forward of port 1194 (or whatever you chose) to the system running the OpenVPN service, also add a static route of the VPN subnet to the VPN server. And viola, you can remote back into home office and appear to be there from anywhere in the world. I've had stuff like this running for over a decade because I used to travel a lot for work and wanted access to my home NAS from the road. Now to try to get this running without a dedicated system means running it on one of those stripped down SOHO routers with limited CPU, memory and configuration. It might work but it'll likely give you nothing but problems as there are so many things to setup in OpenVPN to do it correctly.