I have been using OpenVPN Split Tunnel Site to Site VPNs with an ASUS RT-AC88U and an ASUS RT87U to network 2 locations together for a few years, but after an upgrade to Gigabit Fiber at my home location I started getting a lot of router instability and packet loss, which I finally found to be due to the Routers simply not being up to the job of running a fast network connection and a VPN. After disabling the VPN's my routers are stable again - but what now..? I understand that I could invest a few hundred dollars in replacing these devices with up-to-date hardware (especially those with hardware encryption, to offload the CPU) but right now I was wondering if there are any cheaper solutions using existing hardware.
At my home location I have a fairly powerful windows 'server' (Running Window 10 Home) which is not too busy, and which is also running VirtualBox (so I could run another virtual server on it if needed). At the remote end I was wondering about using an existing Raspberry PI 4 as a VPN server. I would describe my Networking skills as 'intermediate' - I struggle with netmasks and I have never created a static route before, but I generally seem to figure stuff out in the end...
My 2 networks are 192.168.0.0 (home) and 192.168.1.0 (remote). I'm not looking for full name resolution, broadcast, netbios, or anything fancy, but I would like any IPv4 address on either network to be basically reachable from the other location. i.e. if I type https://192.168.1.1 from any computer at my home (192.168.0.0) location, I would expect to open the Web GUI of my remote router... However any traffic NOT destined for the other network will behave normally, i.e. it will take the most direct route, and will not be diverted via the VPN.
I was wondering if someone could point me in the direction of how I would do this... My guess is it is something like...
Peter
At my home location I have a fairly powerful windows 'server' (Running Window 10 Home) which is not too busy, and which is also running VirtualBox (so I could run another virtual server on it if needed). At the remote end I was wondering about using an existing Raspberry PI 4 as a VPN server. I would describe my Networking skills as 'intermediate' - I struggle with netmasks and I have never created a static route before, but I generally seem to figure stuff out in the end...
My 2 networks are 192.168.0.0 (home) and 192.168.1.0 (remote). I'm not looking for full name resolution, broadcast, netbios, or anything fancy, but I would like any IPv4 address on either network to be basically reachable from the other location. i.e. if I type https://192.168.1.1 from any computer at my home (192.168.0.0) location, I would expect to open the Web GUI of my remote router... However any traffic NOT destined for the other network will behave normally, i.e. it will take the most direct route, and will not be diverted via the VPN.
I was wondering if someone could point me in the direction of how I would do this... My guess is it is something like...
- Install some kind of vpn server at both locations (maybe PiVPN at the remote location?)
- Get the vpn connection working at both ends, and confirm the computers with the VPN software on are able to reach devices on the remote networks.
- Make sure the VPN servers have permanent DCHP leases or static IP addresses, so their IP Addresses don't change.
- (and this is where I get flaky...) Tell the VPN servers to accept incoming connections from other devices and pass them on to the remote network?
- Set up a static route on the ASUS routers, to say "all traffic for 192.168.n.0 255.255.255.0 should be routed to the static IP of the VPN Server?
Peter