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by IgorPartola 3074 days ago
There are two places where I found this approach problematic because I want to VPN to my home LAN.

First, client devices with OpenVPN don't support tap only tun. This means that when I'm not home, I can't e.g. my home NAS, etc.

Second, like most Americans, my home internet connection is dog slow. I get 80/5 Mbps. The 80 is tolerable, but the 5 is a drag. Surfing the web when first I have to VPN home...

Bonus problem: even with a business ISP setup, I am still under restriction with what I can do with my own IP address, can't get a static IPv6 allocation, etc.
1 comments
dspillett 3074 days ago
I'm lucky enough to reliably see 76 down 17 up, the best you can get for a residential location in the UK generally unless FTTP is available to you, which is more than sufficient for most of what I do (mail and other mainly-text-with-some-images comms, HN, StackExchange, shopping, SSH & remote desktop or equivalent for various admin). On shared wireless or 3G/4G getting 17+ as a sustained rate is pretty rare in my experience anyway. And I've got a couple of static IPv4s play with, and a /48 IPv6 should I ever get around to using that properly, which I can do pretty much anything I like with and the ISP doesn't shape traffic beyond basic QoS measures either. It isn't a cheap connection, but nice...

Another advantage of the VPN endpoint being at home is that location sensitive applications think I'm there. This seems to reduce "are you a human?" checks in some places, and extra "characters 3, 9, and 11 from your password" requests during credit card payments.

One extra disadvantage, that doesn't affect me but would be a concern to someone gaming or taking part in other timing sensitive tasks, is extra latency, but you'll experience that on any VPN.

I've not found lack of tap support an issue, as I've only needed TCP & UDP via IPv4 anyway so normal routing options over tun do the trick. The lack of local broadcast support can break name resolution in some cases but that is nothing I can't fix with a hosts file entry or static hack in the LAN's DNS resolver.

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