I’m a remote worker who wants to do a little low-key travel while still working but is typically expected to work from my permanent home location. I also have to connect to an office VPN (openVPN) to access internal resources.
Is it possible to setup a home VPN and bounce my laptop traffic through first the home VPN and then the office VPN? Is there some term for this I should be searching?
Not that you SHOULD do this, as there are potential legal regulatory issues with doing your work from elsewhere. But for a though experiment I think the least noticeable way to do this would be use a hardware device to run the VPN connection back to your home network, something like a Raspberry Pi and have that act as a VPN gateway. Essentially the Pi would connect to the VPN and tunnel back to your home network over one interface, and then out a second interface it could output a connection that would appear to be on your home network and thus be transparent to the client device plugged in.
Yes it is definitely possible to set up a VPN server in your house. You will need a computer of some sort to run it on. It doesn’t need to be a powerful computer. I would recommend looking online for a travel router. They are small inexpensive routers that can connect to wifi or Ethernet and pass it on to your laptop. Look for one that is compatible with the VPN server you set up at your house. OpenVPN is usually compatible and the software is free. There are guides online. You will also need to setup port forwarding on your router at home and you may need a dynamic DNS if your home IP address changes from time to time. I use no-ip.com
Ignoring the legal issues…
Assuming your company has endpoint control, and always-on VPN clients on the device, the only way you are going to be able to properly accomplish this, is with another device… ie, a portable travel-sized router.
This can be as simple as a raspberry pi, a small edge router, etc. It just needs to do a few small things.
With, those pieces into place the work device would connect to the porta-router, just like it would connect to your home router.
But, the porta-router would just automatically tunnel everything back to the home location. This would be completely transparent to the work-device, which would have no idea at all that you were not at the home location.
Properly implementing this, would require a bit of networking knowledge to properly setup a tunnel, and the required services.
Might tailscale work for this if you have an exit node on your home network?
Has anyone tried Always Home https://www.homingsystems.com/ for this? Can you tell if this would work? I would not be able to download any software on the work computer
Leave a computer running at home you can turn on remotely and have a roommate that can reset it. $299 should cover the computer. Difficultly increases if you want to be appear to be browsing from there but Remote Desktop access is super easy though probably the least secure.
If you want a laptop remotely to pretend it’s at your home there are routers you can buy but you might need to pay your isp to use the service. Static vs dynamic ip and MAC address, etc
That being said getting caught if you work in health records or finance you will be terminated and if you work in government you might go to jail.
Pretty sure this is what I’m looking for thanks! I appreciate the warning as well.
Very helpful thanks!
Thanks I wasn’t familiar with this product. I read through some documentation, not sure it will fly if I have to install something other than openvpn client on my macbook.