[rikkus]

If you use your own VPN to home then you can access everything on your home network without setting up port forwarding, if you have stuff like that. I used to but not these days.

You could also have the PI run a VPN client and connect to a privacy-promising VPN service, effectively ‘bouncing’ off home.

Not sure if that is even technically possible without pain, or why you wouldn’t connect directly to the privacy-promising VPN.

[joezydeco]

This has some possible use for using streaming devices when traveling abroad.

On a recent trip I tried using IPvanish with a FireTV stick and Amazon detected the VPN, most likely from a blacklisted set of IP addresses.

Using your own home IP should hopefully prevent that from happening.

[mbreese]

Some streaming devices. My IP TV service doesn't work through a VPN back to my home. It acquires location information from GPS (or other location sources), not the IP address. I had wanted to watch something from my home town broadcast channel while visiting family in another state. Turns out that wasn't possible.

[milankragujevic]

Wait, someone bothered to put GPS checking? Awful, that's absolutely not required to license a channel, AFAIK only regular IP-based checks are enforced by channel networks to the distributing ISPs.

Was this on a smart phone / tablet or TV/STB? I used a similar thing to let my parents watch TV from my account -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22052333

I'm not sure why an ISP would limit the physical location, and also how would that work if they have users in another state?

I've heard about WISPs putting GPS locks on their CPE devices, but that's pretty useless too, they're setup to connect to one tower only, if you move it, it won't see the tower and won't connect to anything, so ... ??

[mbreese]

This was using my phone and (I think) my laptop.

The specific about it are that I was trying to watch content on a broadcast channel. It was probably a local sports game. But, I was in a different city with a different affiliate. So, the geographic region does actually play into the licensing for these channels. I could otherwise watch whatever (and the local affiliate for the city I was in), but regardless of what my IP address was, I couldn’t watch the affiliate for my city.

It makes sense, but I’m not sure I was expecting the TV provider to be that detailed.

[jdsnape]

In the U.K. this is done by BT for users of their sport app, so the channels can only be streamed in the U.K. I think this was a requirement of the rights holder (the sports bodies).

[milankragujevic]

Yes, sports are a different thing altogether, the rights holders have draconian rules because piracy is so widespread.

Ironically, a TV show that my ISP's content division made, which is free for it's users, was the most downloaded torrent (in Serbia) in the second half of 2019. I did an analysis of the IPs of everyone who downloaded it, a significant percentage (~20%) were from that ISP.

Basically, people risk fines and warning letters by pirating a TV show that is free for them (cable ISP that doesn't sell Internet without TV, any and all TV packages come with a smart phone app and website where you can watch your channels + a free VOD catalog) because the restrictions on device type, bootloader integrity, IP address are so draconian.

The ISP, of course, looses in the end, because it's users were also uploading the TV show to other torrent clients of non-users, which is lost potential revenue.

[rohan1024]

If it is android then in developer options there's option to spoof location system wide without root user.

[adrianN]

How does the TV get a GPS signal indoors?

[CrazyStat]

I set up a VPN after installing pihole on my rpi, so that I could get the benefits away from home as well.

[Sohcahtoa82]

For port forwarding, I just SSH into my Raspberry Pi and then tunnel through that. Are there any benefits to using a VPN instead, other than not having to configure individual ports to forward? The only one I ever find myself using is VNC.

[henryfjordan]

The only meaningful difference is probably ease. You setup a VPN once but you have to handle SSH every time you want to connect.

Phones all have VPN settings these days, whereas the SSH tunnel would be harder to accomplish.

[rraghur]

Remote troubleshooting machines on your home network.. esp if you have parents/family who aren't tech savvy...

[milankragujevic]

I did this for my parents. I got a RasPi 3 and a 3G modem, and setup remote management so I can check modem parameters remotely, even if the Internet is completely dead (using the 3G modem as an out of band connection).

I setup a VPN client on the 3G interface since there's no public IP address, and I connect to it from my own home network as a local IP address (which can't actually access my network due to explicit firewall rules I setup).

This way I can reboot the modem remotely even if the Internet is dead, and I also setup the Pi to reboot itself every night at 3am, in case something goes wrong and the VPN client crashes.

[_lol]

Hi Milan, would you be able to share more about how you setup the VPN client on the 3G interface?

[milankragujevic]

Yes, since it's a "modern" modem, it appears as a RNDIS ethernet interface. My VPN server's IP is constant, so I just set a default route to my VPN server's IP over 192.168.8.1 which is default Huawei mobile broadband gateway IP.