Best home vpn server?

rufusbear

rufusbear

rufusbear

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Joined
13 Apr 2016
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11
Hi everyone,

I am trying to set a home vpn server up mainly for use when i am out and about and working away. I have tried setting up openvpn as the server on vmware fusion but just cant get the thing to work. Had it working great on a raspberry pi a few years back but that died and the sd card kept corrupting.

Just wondered if anyone could recommend any alternates server/client home solution. I should add i am looking to install on a Mac Mini but to have the option of installing on a windows VM running VMWare fusion.

Thanks everyone
 
What router do you have? / Are you open to changing it?

I use a MikroTik and use the built in PPTP server from that (yes I know hiss and boo's at PPTP) but it works well and I don't need any special programs o nmy machines to connect to it.
 
Thanks guys, i do have the option of setting openvpn up on my netgear D600. I enabled it and followed the instructions to connect and it seemed to connect just fine. The problem was though i was using my phone as a hotspot to connect to the vpn on the router and once connected it was still displaying my phones external IP instead of my home external one. Seems its not tunnelling the traffic through the VPN although i can access cliens on the local LAN when connected.
 
I believe this is what happened when I tried to do the same thing using my iPhone.

It isn't a big issue. Connect the device to the phone using the personal hotspot and then connect to the VPN on the client device.
 
I use openether on a VM on my server ( I believe you can use it on a pi too).
It supports OpenVpn, Ipsec, and my personal favourite SSTP (pretty much indistinguishable from https so hard to block). And nice and easy to setup.
 
meandu229 said:
I use openether on a VM on my server ( I believe you can use it on a pi too).
It supports OpenVpn, Ipsec, and my personal favourite SSTP (pretty much indistinguishable from https so hard to block). And nice and easy to setup.
Click to expand...

+1 (but in Docker)
 
Thanks very much guys, will have a look into softether and watch some videos on setting this up. Might try SSTP and see if i can get this up and running on my mac mini

Thanks again for the advice
 
rufusbear said:
Thanks guys, i do have the option of setting openvpn up on my netgear D600. I enabled it and followed the instructions to connect and it seemed to connect just fine. The problem was though i was using my phone as a hotspot to connect to the vpn on the router and once connected it was still displaying my phones external IP instead of my home external one. Seems its not tunnelling the traffic through the VPN although i can access cliens on the local LAN when connected.
Click to expand...

Sounds like the client ovpn is missing "redirect-gateway def1".
 
Ideally you want PPTP or L2TP/IPSEC as they are the two built-in to iOS. I have L2TP/IPSEC running on my EdgeRouter Lite, and it works beautifully.
 
With regards to L2TP, on my osx server i can setup a VPN either PPTP or L2TP but the L2TP option is just L2TP should it not be L2TP/IPSEC as i believe L2TP on its own is not encrypted? Also on the iphone when adding a vpn connection the options for L2TP are again just L2TP on its own and IPSEC is on its own as well as an option.
 
I believe that the L2TP option in iOS (and OS X) does actually refer to L2TP over IPsec. There's some information here.

My VPN connection on my Vigor2920 is configured to require IPsec and I can connect from my iPhone.

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The only way you could claim OpenVPN is "far more secure" than L2TP/IPSEC is if you assume the latter is intentionally compromised by intelligence services. I wouldn't rule that out at all but it's not exactly known to be true.

It depends what you wanna use the VPN for really. I use it to (a) access my home network from elsewhere, and (b) have a secure connection for banking etc. when using open WiFi networks. I could never get OpenVPN to work properly with my old router (haven't tried with my current one) and, as with a lot of open source software, it's horrendously difficult to set up.
 
Dooksy said:
I don't find it fiddly, open it up, connect, back to the home screen. Sure it's a bit dated but it works, and far more secure than L2TP etc.
Click to expand...
Not sure where you get that OpenVPN is more secure than L2TP/IPSEC?
 
Ok maybe wrong word, but it's only available on one port and it's slower than OpenVPN.

I don't find OpenVPN hard to set up. Configure the server, export the certificate, import to device, connect. Used it plenty of times through work firewalls that block most VPN traffic due to its ability to work off TCP 443 etc..
 
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