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VPN server on router or within home network?
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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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I personally do not trust ISP provided routers to be secure and up to date, nor free of purposefully built in back doors for either tech support or surveillance purposes (or both). You can expect patches and updates on those somewhere on the timescale between late and never.
Therefore I always put those straight into bridge mode and serve my network with my own router, which I can trust and control. Bad actors (or David from the ISP help desk) may be able to have their way with my ISP router, but all that will let them do is talk to my own router, which will then summarily invite them to fuck off.
Likewise, I would not be keen on using an ISP provided router's inbuilt VPN capability, which is probably limited to plain old PTPP -- it has been on all of the examples I've touched so far -- and thus should not be treated as secure.
You can configure an OpenWRT based router to act as an L2TP/IPSec gateway to provide VPN access on your network without the need for any additional hardware. It's kind of a faff at the moment and requires manually installing packages and editing config files, but it can be done.
Thank you for the David link ๐
The distrust is adding up, I see your point. Will be adding an openWRT router to host a VPN and also manage VLANs. Ultimately might move AdGuard there instead of piHole on my NAS.
Still not sure what to think about the cloud-pangolin setup, so might work stepwise.
Thanks!