Building Home Network from scratch with Wifi and Hardware VPN

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1

I tried looking for answers to this question but didn’t find much except maybe a recommendation for a all-in-one router.

Okay: Building a home wireless network. I need to cover a 3000 square foot house, an acre or so of outdoor area, and a remote barn maybe 300 feet away from the main house.

It will be for my parents and they are not tech savvy in the least. Id like to do a hardware VPN that all of the traffic goes thru so that any devices they add to the network are automatically protected.

Im looking for recomendations for:

The main indoor wifi router

The VPN hardware

how to do outdoor antennas

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I have heard that the wifi router can also be the VPN, and saw a couple recommendations for the ASUS RT-AC86U.

Internet is currently a ADSL 20mb but will be upgraded to gigabit foiber in the next year or so.

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So you have a few separate items:

  1. Router. Doesn’t need to be wifi, and removing that requirement may help you find this vpn solution you’re looking for. Vpn device might even be it’s own unit.
  2. Wifi mesh network. Google makes them, tplink makes them, Ubuquiti makes them - I’m running the latter in a 2600 sq ft house without dropoffs, with 3 mesh points.
  3. Outdoor wireless - you look to need both a point to point link (i’m assuming your barn has power), and a blanket outdoor AP or two – again i come back to Ubuquiti - not because they’re necessarily the best, but because I know they sell all of the products mentioned thusfar (including routers).

You don’t need to make everything the same brand, but here’s a place to start looking.

3

If no one is tech savvy, then a set it and forget it is the best option. A vpn going thru a 20mb connection will be really painful!!! Think about fiber to the barn. Good luck with the project

4

A VPN is for connectivity, not about privacy or security. Don’t pay attention to those YT endorsement/ads, you don’t need it for “protection”.

For security your better off planning for VLANs. At least one for their untrusted IOT devices and one for their trusted devices, many do a 3rd for guests (rate limited and not password protected is my fav).

5

Thank you so much for your advice, it really really helped me as i started to look into what I am trying to do. I made a new post that can be found here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/zzg79h/new_home_network_homelab/

If you would like to see what I have done with your advice.

6

Okay, that just means that I have to get the gigabit fiber installed sooner.

I might have a conduit for a fiber to the barn, but really id rather serve it with a powerful direction outdoor wifi.

7

Can you explain this more or suggest some more resources to learn more about what you are saying?

Ill look into vlans

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Resources: Read, Video1, Video2, Video3, Video4, Video5. That took 5 minutes of searching to find those, the info is easily found!

For security, beyond VLANs, make sure their device OS’s are up to date, many non-techy people don’t know how important that is, don’t keep up on it. Some updates can require a reboot, usually right when they want to use it, so they complain about it and try to avoid it.

EDIT: There also lots of info on YT explaining VLANs and how to set them up on your particular router/switch, when you get a VLAN capable system that is!

9

Thank you very much, i will look into these.