LAN over WAN (VPN?) - nooby question sorry

Hi guys, I'm not great at networking stuff, so a little guidance would be much appreciated.

I have two computers (+NAS) at home (behind a sky router) and another in my studio (unknown router). I'd like to have a 'fake LAN' between these machines, so I could do things like network rendering, and access shared (windows/smb) folders as if all these machines were on the same physical LAN. This would be a VPN right?

I'd also like to get around to using a paid VPN service for some anonymity/securities sake for general internet connectivity on these machines + phone.

Does this mean I'd have a VPN within a VPN? I'd also like to maintain a low ping for the instances I might do some gaming... Would that mean somehow isolating just that game traffic out of the VPN? It would be nice to be able to Wake on LAN remotely (I have a synology NAS at home which could potentially forward WOL requests on the home end). On the topic of WOL, to boost my network strength I recently got a non sky router which is operating in bridge mode - since I did that my previous way of using WOL stopped working (unified remote android app).

Could someone point me in the right direction to achieve this stuff?

Thanks for reading and being gentle

A WAN is a Wide Area Network. This is what you're internet connection is referring to. Your Sky Hub will have a modem that allows you to connect your LAN to the WAN.

A LAN is a Local Area Network. In addition to having a Modem your Sky Hub will have a router built in to handle your local area network and "route" traffic to each computer that wants to talk or pass that request out to the WAN if it's not local.

A VPN is a Virtual Private Network. VPN's usually are run over a WAN connection and allow you to connect two LANs together. This means that every computer on each LAN could see one another like they were in the same house.

I assume your studio is not just in your garden and you have a second internet connection at said studio.

If so, yes, setting up a VPN would make sense. There's a couple of ways of doing it but it's worth knowing that there are some limitations unless you want to manually configure literally every aspect of your network configuration and most people will simply turn on/off their VPN connection based on what they're doing.

For example, turning on a VPN connection from your computer to your work computer would mean that all your internet traffic would go out through your works internet connection. You're looking at setting up an OpenVPN server to do this: https://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/howto.html

Running the VPN at the router level (i.e. so all network traffic went between the sites) would mean that you'd need to purchase additional routers (£80/100 price range) to have that level of customisability.

Also, network based rendering is likely to be limited by your upload speeds on your internet connection. Fast Fibre upload speed is less than 1/100th the speed of a real LAN connection and with the overheads of encryption would make this even less so.

Another avenue worth looking at is running an SSH server from one of your computers. This likely wouldn't allow network based rendering but would be a secure, free and simple way to allow you to share files between sites. Bitvise SSH Server is free to setup on whatever you want to be the "server" side of the network (https://www.bitvise.com/ssh-server) and then you use their client to connect to it.

Other options would be simply using a service like DropBox with a monitored folder that when it receives a file starts doing the processing. Combined with TeamViewer for remote access again this would be a cheap way to get things up and running.

Last point about running a VPN on a VPN. Definitely not something people would advise (given the reduction in speed) but you can do it (I've done it) and you'll only be able to tell yourself when you do it how much it actually effects what you're doing.

Oh, last things - while WOL does require a physical wired connection it should still work over a wireless bridge... sooooo... looks like it's one of those magical WOL problems that everyone has and everyone hates!

You could configure (assuming you have the option to do so) split tunnelling so that not all traffic would route down the VPN connection, only traffic for that subnet.

Thanks for your replies.

Yes, studio is at a different physical location with its own internet connection.

With regards to rendering - it would be for things that take maybe minutes per frame, so the bandwidth required for the finished frames would not be prohibitive, but see that for something like transcoding it would not be so useful.

Good to know at least that other people have problems with WOL

So it seems that having a togglable VPN for when doing stuff that needs it is the option... There's no way to have two networks - one for (virtual) LAN and then one that separately feeds in the internet? Are VPNs setup at the NIC level - so two network interfaces could allow this? As I live in a shared house would be odd to pipe housemates video streaming etc. through work doing it at a router level.

Aware of the whole dropbox/teamviewer stuff, thanks, that's what I've been doing so far. Although I'm honestly dubious about the security of teamviewer. Slightly more faith in RDP.

Seems odd that there isn't a simpler solution - seems like something many people would need/want.