I’m going to be away from home for a few weeks and would like to access my computer (LMDE) while I’m away. Remote desktop connection would be ideal, just file transfer would be acceptable.
Is a VPN necessary, or can port forwarding be good enough for a one time use?
What software/networking recommendations do you have?
You have several options.
First important question, though: what type of router do you have? If you own your own router, instead of using the one provided by your ISP, then you may have additional options.
There are other options (like OpenVPN or Wireguard hosted on a device internal to the network, rather than the router) but I personally recommend one of the above 5 options depending on your use case and risk profile.
If you travel a lot, consider purchasing a travel router (eg GL-iNet devices). Once configured, they act as a repeater or access point for your devices, including forwarding all traffic over a VPN. You arrive at your destination, plug in the travel router, use its webUI to connect it to the hotel or guest Wi-Fi of your choice, and then connect all your personal devices to its Wi-Fi network. No need for connecting every device to a new network at each destination. They support captive portal login, AdGuard Home baked in, blocking all non-VPN traffic, and more.
This is very sound advice. Pretty similar to my infrastructure. The gl-inet travel router already with wireguard to VPN into my home network is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
Right? Especially when I had symmetric gigabit (rip marital home before divorce) it was such a game changer. Still great with 1000/50 docsis just not quite as great lol
It also took me a bit to realize GL-iNet is just a custom openwrt stack and you can reach the luci console for advanced tinkering :3
Access to the Luci ui is the reason I bought the first one I got 😁
My router is running OpenWRT (and stopped having intermittent issues after replacing the stock OS).
I’m leaning toward Tailscale for the “quick and easy” recommendation. If I need to do this again, I might try something a little more advanced.
If you’re already running OpenWRT then I personally recommend Wireguard over tailscale if you have the time. It’s not hard to set up at all and takes the third party out of the loop. OpenWRT has excellent support for Wireguard configuration and export of configs to the devices you want to connect (install client, import config). The only “gotcha” is needing DynamicDNS (assuming you don’t have a static public IP)
Tailscale is definitely super-simple but this IS the self-hosted community ;D I always prefer removing third parties at every opportunity.
This is why I ask humans instead of AI. I didn’t consider router level options.
I’ve already got dynamic DNS set up, and I’ve been meaning to set up a way to access my NAS from out of the house. This might be the final push I need.
One obstacle you might encounter is carrier-grade NAT or CGNAT. Some ISPs put residential subscribers behind an additional layer of IPv4 NAT, which makes your public address inaccessible from the internet. In that case, you’ll either need Tailscale or a similar service, or a VPS to act as a relay.
Then there’s Vodafone who have unilaterally removed both the port-forward feature and bridge mode from their residential cable modems, and I hate them, and wish them a hammer to balls.
They removed BOTH? what in the… portforwarding is a pretty basic feature to have, and i would switch ISP if they took away Bridge Mode from me.
They removed almost every basic networking feature with a firmware update. Even in “expert mode”, all I can do is set up the wifi and pick a single /24 network from 192.168.0.0/16. I can’t even pick a goddamn DNS server. Unfortunately the other ISPs that serve my area are at least twice as expensive.
Wow. An ISP going down the route of enshittification by taking away networking basics is not something that i would have expected years ago, but nowadays i am only sad about it.
My ISP wants me to swap out my modem, but as long as it works i won’t do so - i fear they might take away my (officially dynamic, but only changing once in a blue moon when they make changes in their network topology) IPv4 address and stick me back behind the awful CGNAT they have as they did once without asking years ago.
Yep, my network was set up before the ISPs here merged by a smaller one that did things simpler, so I dont even have an ISP modem, just my OpenWRT router and no CGNAT, and I’ve only had my IP change once so far (since I started caring about it at least). Everything newer around uses ISP modems and are behind CGNAT, on my mates modem, they wouldn’t even let him set up his Wi-Fi, he had to go with double NAT-ing and setting 2 APs next to each other (the ISP modem/router has some default trash Wi-Fi). I’m praying they never bother coming to me 🙏
Brave of you to assume I’m human.
…I mean, I am human, but it’s brave to assume
😂
Please note that the Tailscale binaries for OpenWRT are pretty large (even if you cross-compile them with compact and strip). Your router might not have enough storage for it.
If that’s the case, you might work around it by only storing the
tailscaledbinary on persistent storage, because that’s the daemon which runs the actual connectivity. Thetailscalebinary is only used for making configuration changes, you can copy that to RAM disk, use it to set config params, then delete it.