OpenVPN on a home router
In an attempt to get my 1st generation xbox (for XBMC) running on my wireless home network, so I started to look at wireless bridges. Then I realized that for the price of a wireless bridge you can get a WRT54GL, which will bridge a wireless network (with the right firmware) and also do lots of other interesting stuff.
I ended up using the DD-WRT as the software running on my WRT54GL, which gave me the option of also running OpenVPN on the router. Many commercial routers will allow VPN passthrough to another device that is running the actual VPN, but with DD-WRT you run the VPN on the router itself.
This means that I can securely connect to my home network and have access to all of the devices in my home (servers desktops etc). This isn’t all that much unlike SSH’ing into my FreeBSD machine and then connecting from there, but it is much more convenient in that I can just use Windows Explorer to browse to network shares and I can use RDP without having to setup SSH tunnelling.
Essentially I have a fully functional VPN in my home for $50 bucks. Good stuff.
on February 26th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
That’s really cool- I have been looking for some way to setup a VPN server on my home network and not seeing any easy way to do it. Can you use any VPN client software to connect?
Makes me question my choice to go with the D-Link router.
on February 26th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
I’m using the OpenVPN GUI for Windows located at http://openvpn.se/
They do have clients for most every platform, but I’m not sure if you could use VPN client from a commercial distributor… ?
on February 26th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
D-Link does have some supported devices.
DD-WRT does support some D-Link devices… a list is here: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices#D-Link
on February 26th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
My DGL-4300 isn’t listed
on February 28th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Joe, will this also let you operate the stove?