VPN gateway for home LAN

General
1

i have a ubiquiti system at home, and it doesnt play well with “zerotier” VPN..
(that i use on boat router, IPADS, anrdoid phone et al)

I want to expose my home LAN to zerotier - rather than individual devices (at present)

the ubiquit router has no native (or easily hackable) spport for zerotier.

Ive got a rockchip nanoPi R3S (had t lying around from a defunct project)
& its (alledgedl) possible to use OpenWRT in a suitably configured manner
as a vpn gateway on the LAN..

unfortunately AI help has mangled the process & config, to the point after 24hrs Ive given up, reflashed the sdcard/emcc on nanopi - and now starting again - without AI trying to be over clever… wth a continual array of command line (i dont unerdtand) commands.

Question: anyone done anything similar?
im locked in to using zerotier (im a long term “free” user - with a grandfathered good set of features, along wth a working router on the boat that exposes all devices
.. so movg to tailscale and various others. not an option.

2

I haven’t used ZeroTier in a couple of years, but DietPi has a build for the NanoPi R3S and a “ready to run” package for ZeroTier.

Should be a case of:

  • Flash the SD card (or eMMC) using Balena Etcher or similar
  • Follow the bouncing ball for the DietPi setup (follow the first boot wizard process)
  • dietpi-software to install ZeroTier (assuming the installer doesn’t prompt you for packages - I think it does, from memory)
  • sudo zerotier-cli join <yournetwork> and auth from the ZeroTier website (if you’ve got that enabled)

That’s probably the easiest way to get going, but something like Armbian would almost certainly have an R3S build ready to go, and ZeroTier packages to install too.

Hope that helps!

3

thanks will have a look ..
ive done lenty of zerotier clients on rpi or similar,
but this has to play nice inside the ubiquiti lan - where it remains THE router,
and the nanopi (and ubiquiti) is configured to allow nanopi it to be a vpn gateway.
so there are routes and firewall configs needed in nanopi,
along with some static routes in ubiquiti ..

life was so much easier when we didnt need firewalls!

4

managed to get it setup.
after i smcked AI and told it not to be overly clever ..
and found a simple linux distro . then setup some routing tables etc.
all now working..
very happy.
simplifies access to “both” of my networks (home and boat) regardless of if im inside either,
or outside … NICE!

1 Like