I’m relatively computer literate, but new to the even slightly “advanced” networking side of things.
I am am looking into setting up a VPN that would allow me to use my IPTV box at the cottage, essentially making it look like it’s connected to my router at home.
Computers acting as a server at each end or a dedicated router are on the table.
If anyone has any tips, what software to use, or links that would be helpful would be greatly appreciated.
I feel like I need some help at least narrowing my google search down from the tsunami of unrelated info online.
So presuming you have an internet connection both at home and at your cottage, you can conceivably configure a site to site VPN on the routers with all your traffic flowing out your “home” network, which means it will all be on your “home” IP address.
I do exactly this with pfSense. I have OpenVPN and WireGuard tunnels set up I can connect to from my Smart TV at my cottage about 1700 miles from home. I presume you are trying to get around the Netflix “password sharing” ban. There is no way I could possible get my TV home every 30 days like they want you to for travelling.
I originally used OpenVPN for this but recently set up WireGuard as well which is a little faster. It works perfectly for making Netflix think I’m always at home.
Thanks, looks like site to site might have been the wording I was missing.
Would there be away to make the IPTV box think it’s connected to my router at home doing this? Rather then being a double NAT? I know my TV company likes blocking things when people try using their own routers in a double NAT.
I think providers have ways of sensing this kind of activity. I can vpn home and try to watch stuff from my mobile app, but I think they use TTL to tell I’m taking an extra hop.
I’d learned that a while ago and I tried to retrace my steps to find a link for documentation, but I didn’t find anything immediately. I asked chatgpt and it didn’t do much for me. Best I can figure is that it expects a certain TTL since they know how many hops it takes to get from your router to their endpoint. That being said, so many people double NAT that it should be a widespread problem. So maybe I’m just wrong.
If you have Asus routers, look into setting up an OpenVPN server on the home router, and an OpenVPN client on the cottage router that connects back home using TAP. That will effectively bridge the two networks together.
There’s a few more settings you may need to adjust (such as making sure the cottage network only accesses the Internet through the VPN tunnel) but otherwise, the cottage devices will look like a device in your home network.
I’ve been doing this for a couple of months now with Netflix since they started blocking more than one IP address and it has worked perfectly. Once a tunnel is open they have no idea how many hops it takes to get to your home WAN port. If they could trace your traffic through a tunnel a VPN would be useless for anonymity.