I have this set up on my router. My wifi is blanket tunneled through a VPN. For annoying sites that restrict access like reddit, my router routes through a specific VPN server that doesn’t (yet) get blocked (I don’t post/comment/browse, but occasionally find a post that answers a question). That way it works on my whole home network, regardless of device.
Same could be done for YouTube presumably, but maybe a little more complicated (reddit seems to work with a single /32 address).
Plus, it’s fun to set up—MikroTik router, Mullvad, and an ARM SBC doing the VPN duties for me, but myriad ways to get it working for other configurations.
For reading reddit you can just use a redlib frontend and never get blocked. When I get the “woah there, pardner!” I just take the URL from the /r/ onward and paste it after a frontend URL. Takes 2 seconds.
Also, setting up a router level VPN is just an OpenWRT config on plenty of routers. Depends on your firmware how many servers you can have listed to bounce between. Otherwise just bounce more per device.
I’m doing a crude version of this with a Flint 2 router and Mullvad. Don’t enjoy fiddling with my network (and upstream is unreliable for now, making troubleshooting an irritating game of crossing off doubts each time I have issues, rather than learning things better).
At the moment I just have a guest Wifi that doesn’t get VPN’ed for things like Roku devices and such (slowly migrating the home away from stuff like this).
I appreciate the always-on “blanket” traffic tunneling, a lot. But I’d like a more flexible setup - things like allowing access to Jellyfin from guest Wifi (or similar), site-specific exclusions or other workarounds for when I need to reach a banking site that has predictable VPN complaints, etc.
Not a fan of just playing house-wide VPN exit whack-a-mole each time myself or someone else experiences an issue, but maybe that’s part of the game.
Know of any good starting points for the flexibility I’m describing? Probably just need to learn LuCI and firewall and VLAN principles?
I have this set up on my router. My wifi is blanket tunneled through a VPN. For annoying sites that restrict access like reddit, my router routes through a specific VPN server that doesn’t (yet) get blocked (I don’t post/comment/browse, but occasionally find a post that answers a question). That way it works on my whole home network, regardless of device.
Same could be done for YouTube presumably, but maybe a little more complicated (reddit seems to work with a single /32 address).
Plus, it’s fun to set up—MikroTik router, Mullvad, and an ARM SBC doing the VPN duties for me, but myriad ways to get it working for other configurations.
For reading reddit you can just use a redlib frontend and never get blocked. When I get the “woah there, pardner!” I just take the URL from the /r/ onward and paste it after a frontend URL. Takes 2 seconds.
Also, setting up a router level VPN is just an OpenWRT config on plenty of routers. Depends on your firmware how many servers you can have listed to bounce between. Otherwise just bounce more per device.
I’m doing a crude version of this with a Flint 2 router and Mullvad. Don’t enjoy fiddling with my network (and upstream is unreliable for now, making troubleshooting an irritating game of crossing off doubts each time I have issues, rather than learning things better).
At the moment I just have a guest Wifi that doesn’t get VPN’ed for things like Roku devices and such (slowly migrating the home away from stuff like this).
I appreciate the always-on “blanket” traffic tunneling, a lot. But I’d like a more flexible setup - things like allowing access to Jellyfin from guest Wifi (or similar), site-specific exclusions or other workarounds for when I need to reach a banking site that has predictable VPN complaints, etc.
Not a fan of just playing house-wide VPN exit whack-a-mole each time myself or someone else experiences an issue, but maybe that’s part of the game.
Know of any good starting points for the flexibility I’m describing? Probably just need to learn LuCI and firewall and VLAN principles?