Hello. I run a small business remotely from home. I am traveling to Europe and want to set up a VPN so that I can use my home internet and IP address because a few systems I am working with will not allow non-US connections. One option was to connect remotely to my computer and work that way but I though that it might be better to set up a VPN. I have frontier and I think it has a dynamic IP, so is there any way to have my VPN connect even if the IP changes? Would be the best way of doing that and which router or any other device would you recommed?
Edit.
I have 1gig upload/download speed and an old Tenda AC15 AC1900 router which I am looking to upgrade anyways.
Many consumer routers such as Asus and Synology come with a built in VPN server and DDNS service, you can use that to connect to your VPN even if your IP changes.
Cable modems will keep your public IP address for some time,
but if you’re travelling overseas, I wouldn’t gamble on it.
Some home routers have a VPN service built into them,
but you’d have to check your user manual to find out.
When properly configured, you’d establish a VPN link to your home router,
and would then be able to use something like Remote Desktop to access a
PC on your home network. Sometimes via the machine’s name on the network,
but I find that setting a static IP for a machine I intend to access remotely
is a more reliable option.
Since you have a dynamic IP address at home, you can either:
1.) Pray that it doesn’t change while you’re abroad
2.) Use something like a Dynamic DNS service (DDNS)
3.) Get a static public IP address from your ISP
4.) Email someone at home, and have them advise you of your public IP.
Any of those might work, with varying success of course.
What router do you have? Do you run any servers at home? Plenty of people get around having a dynamic IP by using a Dynamic DNS (DDNS) service like DuckDNS, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
If u buy any recent mikrotik router, they have options for ‘zerotier’. It’s wat i use to connect to my home network or as VPN. Changing external ip does not matter for this technology
U could also run zerotier on a PC on the home network and configure some forwarding rules, depending on the OS . if u don’t want to buy a router
Dynamic DNS service. afraid.org offers a free service for at least one host. I use them. My router updates it as needed as a scheduled job. I run OpenVPN on my Synology unit, which has far more computing power than my router (to deal with encryption), with port forwarding. It works well.
Are the systems you are trying to access on the internet or in your home network?
If it’s on the internet and you need US IP, but you don’t want a 3rd party VPN, then you can possibly set up AWS/ Azure with Open VPN in US Region. If you are new to AWS or Azure you get 1 year free tier resources.
For home networks, you can still set up Cloud VPN, but open the home network only to the AWS/Azure VPN server. Not sure if this is less secure than setting up a home vpn server.
Not the expert in networking, but I had set up an AWS VPN server overnight with the tutorial in medium.com
Update: Incase you want to set up a home VPN, TP-Link Omada ER605 has a VPN option, but not sure how easy it is to set up.
Look into Tailscale if you have any device that can run permanently run it. It takes care of Nat traversal and firewall ports and the like. It is based on WireGuard.
I do this right now. I use a firewall called opnsense and VPN called wireguard that installs within opnsense. It’s lightweight and fast. I tunnel my phone through it whenever I’m not home so I always benefit from my home’s network level ad-blocking. I also do this with my laptop. There’s plenty of tutorials online that can get you set up easily. Opnsense also has a dynamic DNS module that registers your firewalls current IP with whoever does your DNS. You can use any DNS provider including free things like duck DNS and cloudflare. I personally use AWS route 53.
If you don’t want to set up a whole new firewall you can set up wireguard on any Linux system and forward ports from your current fw to that host. I think the “linuxserver” group has a pretty good guide on how to accomplish this with their wg container also.
I’ve never heard of these. I am looking to get a new router anyways so it might be a good option. Could you recommend any model for up to 1000 Mbps upload/download speed?
I’ve not used TeamViewer, but I suppose if your desktop at home
checks in with an external server periodically, to update it’s
public IP address, it might work. . .
For a router without wifi, there is the rb5009, it comes in a version with and without POE output.
U could then get access points to do wifi if u want.
If u want a router with wifi, maybe the ‘Hap ac3’ or the ‘RB4011iGS+5HacQ2HnD-IN’
They also have a new model out now the ‘hap ax2’ but not familiar with that one yet.
They should all be able to do 1gbps afaik. But availability is not that good atm for any of them. They also have a bit of a higher difficulty to setup if u are not very technical.
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