Hi folks, I’m just getting into this hobby thanks to the posts in this community. So far, I’ve installed Ubuntu server 22.04 on an old laptop and got paperless working, and I’m pretty pumped. Now I would like to access it outside of my home network on my phone.
I have a Netgear R7000 with Advanced Tomato installed. Here’s my plan, but I don’t know if it would work… So I’m hoping for a peer review of sorts.
- Get openVPN working on the router as a server.
- make a certificate for my phone and use it as a client.
- use my fedora laptop as the CA (?).
I think I need to use easy-RDA to make the keys and certificates…
Does that sound about right? It’s this a good approach or is there something better/easier/more effective?
If there’s a great tutorial around for accessing the home network externally, I’d super appreciate it. Would obviously prefer to do it myself and not pay for a service… I’ve been enjoying the learning experience!
Tailscale
That’s the only word you need. Ultimately, traditional VPN is outdated and almost obsolete. Wireguard is the “next iteration” of network tunneling tech. And Tailscale just makes it super simple.
+1 for Tailscale because it uses the WireGuard protocol. Tailscale just adds additional features on top of the WireGuard base. That much said, I am more interested in Slack’s Nebula project because it is completely open source. I like the approach Nebula is taking towards mesh networking. I’m just still struggling to get it working.
Tailscale using headscale is basically hosting your personal Tailscale network, which is nice and makes it open source too, just FYI
I just came across headscale…looks kinda neat. The docs have me a bit scared though - from the Installation section: “Configure Headscale by editing the configuration file”…uhm ya I’ll just go configure all of the things to do all of the stuff, hehe.
Use chat gpt to help you install it , I used it sometimes and it help me to understand it a lot.
Good idea…I just it a bunch for other stuff but hadn’t thought to use it for this. Thanks!
Omg its seems its working with cgnat, ill give this a try
It’s what I use to remote access to my Starlink network. Have it running on a little Linux box, and publishes my internal subnet so I can access any device on my network with Tailscale running on just one PC.
Neat, I’ll admit that im a bit late with vpn bandwagon, I’ve been fiddling around with dynamic dns and prays to the network gods that my LAN wont encounter some replicating malware or nasty stuff (although im monitoring it and has logs). And yea, wow, this thing is fast and easy.
I’ll pitch ZeroTier instead, it’s the same concept, but it’s more FOSS friendly, older, doesn’t have the non-networking “feature bloat” of Tailscale, and can handle some really niche cases like Ethernet bridging (should you ever care).
Just:
If you want to go full self hosting, you can do that too but you will need something with a static IP to control everything (https://docs.zerotier.com/self-hosting/network-controllers/?utm_source=ztp) this would replace the web panel parts.
You can also do a LAN routing based solution pretty easily using something like a Raspberry Pi (or really any Linux computer).
Really, wow ok. Someone recommended that in another post, and I thought there must still be some value to doing it myself.
So does all the traffic go through tailscale? I gotta watch a YouTube video…
No all traffic goes peer-to-peer, it only uses Tailscale’s servers for discovery and NAT traversal. Only if a peer-to-peer connection is impossible then Tailscale proxies the connection.
And it proxies encrypted data that it doesn’t have private keys to.