Business, Technology and Society

VPN Routers

10 Comments

OK, now that I’m back on the air, I’m thinking that with ExpressVPN’s limit of five simultaneous devices (at least for the low-cost plan), I should use it for mobile devices, and do something else at home. I’d like to install it on the Netgear Orbi mesh, but ExpressVPN doesn’t support it, and it might not have enough processing power to do all that encryption anyway. But I can pick this up for $140 bucks. Could I just put that downstream from my cable modem, and feed the Orbi with it for the home wifi, freeing up my ExpressVPN account for phones, laptops and tablets? It might also allow me to access my home machines remotely, except I don’t think I have static IP.

[Update a few minutes later]

Or this one looks like an even better deal, though it might not be as easy to set up.

10 thoughts on “VPN Routers”

  1. Save a few buck go for the TP-Link I’m sure you won’t mind the Chicoms having all your internet browsing history. Not that the Linksys is much better , being built and most likely using chips designed in China.

    As far as sharing your desktops remotely don’t necessarily need a static IP. This would do .

    1. Well, unlike most of your commentary, that’s an interesting one. Is there any such device that can be procured without that problem? Do I really have to set up my own cheap Linux box and configure it myself as a dedicated router? Because I could do that.

      1. I’ve been running openwrt.org on TP-Link routers for years and been quite happy with the results. (Mostly, that means I don’t need to think about them.)

        I believe openwrt is a fork of dd-wrt, but it could be the other way ’round.

        I know that there is (or was) a company selling routers with open-wrt preinstalled, although I’ve not checked lately.

  2. DD-WRT is a routing focused Linux distribution that can run on some (by no means all) cheap consumer routers, might be worth a look. I have not looked into this for a couple years myself and couldn’t tell you the latest details. If you don’t also want it be be the wireless router there are probably a ton of cheap single-board-computers that can do the trick if a regular PC seems like overkill (it is).

    1. I had good luck installing DD-WRT on an old Linksys-WRT54G to turn it into a bridge router to support a desktop in a home office (not my own) where the cable co router was physically in a different room, where running a wire was impractical but it had WiFi as did the Linksys. The problem was that the Linksys firmware didn’t support bridging, but DD-WRT did. It worked beautifully. At that time I don’t believe it supported VPN, but maybe that has changed. You’d need a router with some compute horsepower tho. Doubtful the WRT54G would be up to that.

  3. My experience with a consumer grade VPN router was not a good one so I won’t mention the brand. Also admittedly it was years ago and the first consumer grade one on the market as far as I know. I couldn’t get the blasted thing to run anywhere near line speed, even when the VPN was off! And it was significantly slower. I suspect its under-powered CPU was being asked to do too much. It was a speculative buy. My thinking at the time was that someday I might have a client that required it but at the time there was no server for it to connect to. I just junked the whole thing and went back to a “normal” router. Later I found out that clients that required VPN also supplied the client side software (and a laptop!) for it that I could connect to my home business network and so I just did that and everything worked fine. So you have been warned. It might not really be worth the effort. It might be far less hassle to just upgrade your VPN service. Once burned, twice shy.

  4. Dynamic DNS can work in place of static IP. I you have a Netgear router connected to your ISP modem it probably has built-in Dynamic DNS. In my Netgear router I have Dynamic DNS enabled, selected the “www.no-ip.com” dyn-DNS service, and my hostname is “.netgear.com”. It works. Occasionally I notice my home IP has changed, but my home DNS name always works. So netgear.com & no-ip.com are working together.

    1. I used to pay for a static IP with CenturyLink, but when I moved and had to switch to Comcast, they didn’t have that available. Instead, I use https://freedns.afraid.org.

      My Comcast dynamic IP address hasn’t changed in years. The one time that happened, it didn’t take long to change the DNS records to point to the new one. They have free options, but I’m willing to pay $10/month for services that I find useful.

  5. I wound up getting an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter with the goal of being able to force any DNS traffic through my PiHole and turn my Orbi into just an access point. I haven’t gotten around to setting that up, though, full disclosure, but it might be worth a look:

    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HXT8EKE

    I know it’ll be some work and learning to get it going, so procrastination has won out. But for what I wanted and what you’re describing, might not be a bad place to start.

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