Automatic VPN

[cata_mora]

I am new to setting up networks and hope I can get some assistance.
My family runs a small chain of hotels in Bolivia. We wanted to offer people that work from home the possibility to work from our Hotel while they tour the country. We wanted to offer an extra level of security for these and all our customers.

Our thought is to have our router (or other device) hook up directly to a router we have in our USA office. All internet calls and such would be routed thru the USA internet conection. So if a computer hooks up to the network in Bolivia, and say does a search on google or looks at local weather, it would default all that to our California conection thru Verizon. If they go to do a search on the internet to see what their ip/location is it would show California, etc etc.

The concern we have is if a customer comes that uses a work VPN, would this setup cause any issues..? Their VPN would practically be going inside ours... tunnel within a tunnel...

 

[CaptainSTX]

One of the issues you will face is the reduction in through put first as the result of the added distance from Bolivia to California and second the overhead the VPN processing adds to the network.

First do a series of speed tests to the nearest speedtest servers in Bolivia. Then repeat the tests to a server in California.

Unless you invest in top of the line SOHO networking equipment you will be doing well to get 75% of the throughput that you tested from Bolivia to California. With the right (more money ) you may be able to get 95% throughput.

If you can live with the reduced throughput then signup with a VPN provider that has servers in California and then program your router to run an OpenVPN. It isn't always easy to get a OpenVPN running on a router. If you are not comfortable flashing firmware and programming a router you might want to look at the hardware that is available from various sources that is already set up to connect to a particular provider and run OpenVPN. I have had excellent results using hardware from Sabai Technology.

Setting up and getting a PPTP VPN connection to run is much simplier, but if security is important then don't use PPTP.

 

[cata_mora]

Thank you CaptainSTX for such a quick response.

Is it possible to purchase 2 routers, one for each location and set them up so that the Bolivia one only routes all Internet traffic thru our California location..? So if the Bolivia router is ever moved, maybe even to another country, it would still find the other router over the internet and then rout all traffic in that location thru California.
We don't expect to change the or move the California location at least for 10 years so we are willing to spend the additional dollars.

Any thoughts..?? What routers would you recommend, or place that I could buy..? I reached out to Sabai and they informed me that they did not have routers that could do what I've just described.

Again, thanks so much!

 

[sinshiva]

hi, i think that this plan is ok in theory, but getting a vpn running within a vpn would be difficult. Some of the problems customers would face would be that the first VPN would have a reduced ethernet MTU, and so a second VPN would need an even further reduced MTU, to work efficiently. It could probably still work with incorrect MTU sizes, but i've no idea what kind of performance would be had.

I think the best you can really do is to make sure the equipment at your bolivia locations aren't a horrific bottleneck and perhaps make suggestions to free and paid VPN services at a free WiFi hotspot terms page. Hell, VPN services should pay YOU for advertising for them, being a motel/hotel chain.

 

[CaptainSTX]

Thank you CaptainSTX for such a quick response.

Is it possible to purchase 2 routers, one for each location and set them up so that the Bolivia one only routes all Internet traffic thru our California location..? So if the Bolivia router is ever moved, maybe even to another country, it would still find the other router over the internet and then rout all traffic in that location thru California.
We don't expect to change the or move the California location at least for 10 years so we are willing to spend the additional dollars.

Any thoughts..?? What routers would you recommend, or place that I could buy..? I reached out to Sabai and they informed me that they did not have routers that could do what I've just described.

Again, thanks so much!

With a dual gateway router such as Sabai offers you could set the default to use the Calif VPN connection. For those guests that need to use their own VPN you would assign their MAC/Static IP to run through the local ISP using the dual gateway and then they could use their own VPN client for a secure connection.

You could also accomplish the same thing using two routers, one for VPN and the other for a local connection.

 

[Ron]

you can contact punchvpn.com. They can build customize router based on OpenWRT. They can probably give you the solution.