1 yr. ago • 93%

Advice: accessing home network beyond home

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!

42 comments

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 Ultimately, traditional VPN is outdated and almost obsolete.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.

18
- +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.
  
  6
  
  Tailscale using headscale is basically hosting your personal Tailscale network, which is nice and makes it open source too, just FYI
  
  2
- Omg its seems its working with cgnat, ill give this a try
  
  5
  
  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.
  
  2
- 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:
  
  Go to their website, create an account, and create a network
  
  Add ZeroTier to the devices you need to connect
  
  Enter your network ID on those devices
  
  Approve the devices in the web control panel
  
  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).
  
  1
  
  How secure is zerotier in your opinion?
  
  1
  
  How is it FOSS if they are asking you for a login? If traffic from your devices even touches their servers, you don't know what is happening with it, and the entire process turns into a black box
  
  0
- 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...
  
  1
  
  The traffic goes through a wireguard connection. Tailscale is just a facilitator to initiate the connections. There's more to it than that, but that's the basic gist of it.
  
  The core technology is wireguard, and you could set everything up yourself, but plain wireguard can be a chore and pain to get all setup. Tailscale is honestly 5 minutes to get a basic connection going.
  
  1
Big thanks to everyone that replied. Message received: ditch openVPN in favour of wireguard :-)

7
- Uhm, status update: I just signed up for tailscale, and I'm able to access my home server after about 2 mins from first logging into the tailscale website. Wow...you guys weren't kidding 🙃
  
  So what should I do next?
  
  8
  
  Nas, Media server, device auto backups to nas, game server, chatgpt instance, Lemmy instance, a website, wiki, nextcloud, pihole, or home assistant.
  
  If you intend to collect/store data or make more servers, a nas would probably be a good idea to have.
  
  1
I know it’s been mentioned before - but plain Wireguard is my way to go. KISS - keep it simple, stupid! setup might be a little bit of a learning curve, but once you got it for one device, others aren’t a big issue.

I had a CA, with OpenVPN, but that’s to much for a small setup like remote access to your home network.

Use it on iOS, Ubuntu and Windows to access my home services and DNS (Split-Tunnel).

It’s a pretty easy setup on OpenWrt. A quick look into the fresh tomato wiki tells me, that it shouldn’t be to complicated to achieve on your router (firmware). If you need help with setting Wireguard up, let me know, I’m happy to help out.

5
You're mostly correct, but you don't need the laptop to act as a CA or anything. A CA is just a cryptographic key, you can generate them on the laptop, on the router, or wherever you want. All that matters is that the router and the clients agree on what the CA is.

Alternatively, you can port forward from the router to the laptop and run the VPN on the laptop itself. That will open you up to more VPN protocols such as WireGuard which is newer, works so much better, and a whole lot easier to get set up. That stuff just works. Or you can forward the SSH port, and use SSH forwarding using an app like JuiceSSH as the way to enter your network.

3
- I can vouch for wireguard it's super easy to setup
  
  3
  
  Same here, but never tried tailscale or anything like that
  
  1
@Drudge
That's a pretty solid plan, although I'd use WireGuard instead of OpenVPN. Otherwise, step 1 may take a lot of time, whereas WG makes all that dumb simple. There are even tools (eg dsnet) that generate client configs that work with the WG Android client.

One fantastic thing about WG is not having to dick with CAs or CA authorities.

1
I personally am a fan of DIY when it comes to VPN. Check out Nebula. I'm working on building a Nebula-based network. Right now I'm using WireGuard tunnels. Pure WireGuard is diificult to scale but it does operate well scaled up.

1
If

you dont have your own ip

running under cgnat

no plans to host something that has to be piped ouside your LAN(like a webserver or something)

you may want to look at dynamic dns
1

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