Any tips on setting up a VPN or other means of accessing your machines remotely?

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Following on from part of the discussion in the Digital Nomads & Frequent Travellers (Tips/Advice/Chat) thread, I thought it might be an idea to have a dedicated thread on setting up a VPN or other remote access software.

If you have any questions, advice, links to how-tos or have such a set-up yourself, please let us know!

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Here’s my own question/query…

Please correct me if I’m wrong but from my understanding (for Mac users) there are a few options, mainly, and going from least secure to most secure:

  • Just use Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) to access a machine remotely.
  • Use ARD plus a commercial VPN service.
  • Use ARD with your own VPN

We then have a few different options for running our own VPN (i.e as the last option above):

  • Use a VPN router that is Wireguard capable.
  • Use a Rasperrby Pi for the VPN.
  • Use a Mac mini (or another spare computer) for the VPN.

Each of these three would always be on, and the benefit of the last option is you could also use it as your home ARD machine (so all your files/emails etc would be on it) though the downside in this case is it would always be on so this increases your attack surface (to mitigate this you could have a second Mac, which you put to sleep when not needed for ARD access).

As a slight variation you could set up your own VPN at home just for when you need to access your remote machine via ARD, and then use a commercial VPN service for general browsing/internet use when away. This gives you the most security for accessing you home network/machine, but the best speed-security for everyday browsing.

Does the above sound about right? Are there any other options or things to consider?

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I just use a SSH reverse proxy. A shell is all that I need.

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Try Zerotier or Tailscale. Game changer for remote access.

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Yeah, wireguard / tailscale are my goto nowadays. Once the networking question is handled you can then run everything else on top of that, like Samba/VNC/….

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I’m definitely going for Tailscale with the open Headscale control plane node (so I don’t depend on Tailscale’s servers) later this year.

I pondered a few solutions like ZeroTier and Slack’s Nebula but it’s either too much work to configure, or it has speed / reliability problems.

I’ve used Tailscale in 3 jobs with zero issues ever. It just disappears and does its job.

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I’ve enjoyed https://netbird.io/ as a Tailscale alternative. It’s open source and they just built upon exisiting technologies like Wireguard and WebRTC - How NetBird Works - NetBird Docs

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