VPN cascading makes a loop. Can it be optimized?

Hello,

I’m using a GL-AX1800 Flint on 4.2.1 beta4 firmware, where I’m using VPN cascading. I have then 2 VPN connections chaining, one between end-device (like a smartphone) → GL-iNet router (let’s call it VPN1), and one between GL-iNet router → VPN service provider (let’s call it VPN2). When I’m away from home, this works pretty fine, my phone goes through VPN1 then VPN2. However, when I’m at home (and then already directly connected to the router), it seems using VPN2 to reach the VPN1 connection address, because the router doesn’t seem to realize it is itself the destination of the connection, and then it makes VPN2 → VPN1 → VPN2. I noticed this because I saw that the IP of the client connected to the WG server was the same than the server address of the VPN client.

Of course, going through VPN2 twice isn’t much useful. One solution I’ve found to optimize this, is to enable Dynamic DNS, use the glddns address as VPN1 destination, and I edited the hosts file in the router to manually define xxxxxx.glddns.com address to resolve as 192.168.8.1. Then, when I’m at home, VPN1 client IP is now a 192.168.8.X address. But I have to restart the WG connection on my phone everytime I get away from home and 192.168.8.1 isn’t reachable anymore, to force a new resolution of xxxxx.glddns.com.

Is there a better solution for this situation ?

Is this the gl.inet router you setup VPN cascading and it has public IP? Do you setup port forward?

Yes the router has VPN cascading setup and no, it is not directly connected to the public IP, there is a upper subnet in between. And yes there is port forwarding setup at the upper subnet to reach the VPN server on the gl-inet router.

It may be the same case for port forwarding support NAT loopback. Could it be possible to enable that option on your main router?

No, unfortunately my ISP router seems not supporting this.
However, I’m wondering what my ISP router has to do with this, while it is not supposed to see anything of the communication to establish VPN1 ? My gl.inet router is configured such as every outgoing traffic goes through VPN2 and is not visible from the upper ISP subnet (it even does it very well, but for the particular case of establishing VPN1, it doesn’t have to).