New to the whole VPN game, will this work?

Routers
1

Hello, I am traveling overseas and work from where I am going to be but need to be connected to my home internet. I plan to purchase 2 GL travel routers.

  1. One will stay at home “A” and connect to my Verizon FIOS router via cat6 cable to WAN port which is non-CGNAT
  2. Then i will take the other GL travel router and connect to home “B” overseas using a cat6 to LAN port.
  3. I will connect to internet in home B via travel router and will be able to connect to home A internet and show my IP address as at “home”

My question is will this work? I have very limited knowledge about networking but from what I saw GL routers come with Wireguard VPNs installed already which should be able to let me connect between both homes correct? any tips or comments would be greatly appreciated.

2

Three tips:

  • If the Verizon unit is a 'modem/combo' unit either put it into 'bridge mode' or put the 'base station' GL.iNet unit IP on its 'DMZ'
  • Prefer WireGuard but set up OpenVPN as a fallback just in case. The product pages for the models you're looking at will show the differences in rates.
  • Field test before departing.
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As someone who travels full time and uses this type of solution, just a heads up that it is not always plug and play. Give yourself a lot of lead time to set this up, and test the heck out of it before you leave your home country.

Also have a plan in case it breaks. Routes die, home networks go down, and an infinite number of other issues may occur while you are on travel.

Remember that you will probably have no control over the local network while you travel, and the hotel, Airbnb, hostel, or workplace may be limiting ports, protocols, DNS, and even actively blocking VPN traffic.

I carry 2 spare travel routers (both USB150, so they are very tiny), have multiple VPN routers at family and friend houses in my home country, all running multiple VPN protocols (Wireguard, OpenVPN, and SoftEther).

I am moving around Asia right now, and for some reason, one of my VPN servers will not pass my traffic from my current location, although it worked just last week from another Asia country. It is nice to have alternative paths, as I would be dead in the water right now if I relied on a single VPN client and server.

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I am not a networking expert also but isn't that a Tailscale scenario ?

5

TailScale is WireGuard based. The same caveats apply.

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I know, but with Taiscale the setup is much simpler and possibly he does not have to buy any router.

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As @eric points out it's a whole other ballgame when dealing with overseas Internet. IIRC Turkey, Egypt aren't too fond of VPNs & DPI is a PITA even if you're not travelling to China.

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@xMario99x here is my two cents from someone who is on the run for a few years,

you dont need two routers. Use AWS lightsail (the cheapest instance) in closest region to spin the Wireguard server rather then rely on your router. No one will suspect you, half of the internet is on the aws these days. But you will have way fewer moving parts.
To spin wg up - use any of the existent solutions, the easiest one is AmneziaVPN, you just feed your instance credentials and after a minute it returns you back a wireguard key.

Fot the WG client just use any gl inet router and killswitch enabled, you will have superb speeds, config will be super reliable.

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Data center IP addresses, like those used by AWS, are regularly blocked by some companies and government agencies. They may be good enough for some traffic, but not all.

When I do not need a residential IP address, I use a free Oracle VPS as my VPN server. I have it set up as a multiple protocol VPN server, supporting SoftEther, OpenVPN, and Wireguard on multiple ports to evade blocking on the outgoing link. I have been running these free VPS 24 hr/day since 2019 at zero cost.

If you don’t want to use Oracle, you can find a VPS as cheap as $7/year on lowendtalk.com. Having a data center IP addresses, they are blocked by some sites, but they are still useful.

1 Like