1-Port Ethernet LAN device connects to Remote VPN server.

[Karl OMeara]

This must exist.

I have a LAN at my mum's house and I want to place onto that network a small hardware box which presents and ethernet port. Into this ethernet port I want to plug a device. The device needs to get a local IP from her network, and then connect via PPTP to my network over the internet. Effectively the device I plug into this box will wind up with a local IP and connectivity as if it was connected in my house.

I could do this easily with yet another box on her LAN. PPTP client to my router which allows inbound VPN connections. But there must be some box I can configure via the browser that can do it? Any ideas?

 

[bill001g]

Very confusing what you are asking for. Any pc connected to the lan can form a pptp vpn with your router you may need to do some special config on the router at the remote location but understand pptp and allow it passthough.

Since it is simple you must be asking something else like the device does not support pptp such as a roku box. In this case you will need a vpn router or a another dedicated pc acting as a vpn router. Although you could configure it to reside on the same network it will be a much more complex configuration.

 

[Karl OMeara]

Yeah sorry about that

Very confusing what you are asking for.

I've found this site Gliffy.com and made a diagram of what I want to configure.

My Network: My Router B. Is a draytek and I've PPTP VPNed into it from all over the world. It gives me a IP on my LAN which is in the 10.10.18.x range.

M Mum's network I want to place a GSM gateway (essentially you can put a SIM card in it and it registers to local GSM network). Anyway this thing needs effectively to be on my LAN 10.10.18.150 say for example. So I looking for a Device X - on the diagram that always tries to connect to my Router B via the internet. As I say I could set up a PC to do this, but that overkill in terms of cost, power consumption, the hard disk might pack up, its very big etc... So really I looking for a small embedded device that does that for a low cost. What would that be called?

Thanks!

 

[bill001g]

What you are looking for is a layer 2 vpn tunnel. I am not sure a consumer router can do this. The general term for this is L2TP so you could look for support. I would suspect you best bet is dd-wrt with openvpn on it. You could of course buy some older used commercial cisco routers.

Part of the reason it is hard to find support is this is not a recommended design. You are carrying a lot of broadcast traffic that a lan tolerates easily over a wan.
If you can find a way to use different subnets and use layer 3 routing to accomplish this you will have a much more stable implementation.

 

[Karl OMeara]

Great Answer. Thanks Bill001g. I'll check out these terms. I've flashed a dd-wrt onto some devices before, but yeah maybe that's why the connections are a bit flaky.