Ask HN: Why isn't using your home network as a VPN more common?
2 pointsby hjconstas5 hours ago3 comments
  • JohnFen5 hours ago
    I've been doing this for many years, and I don't know why it's not more common. The most common thing I hear when I explain to people, though, is they don't see the point if the VPN isn't shielding your traffic from your home's ISP.

    I think that just speaks to people thinking that's the only use case for a VPN, probably because of all the marketing from VPN service providers.

    I originally set it up in order to be able to funnel all of my smartphone traffic through my home network so my firewall rules apply to my phone as well. Since then, though, I've discovered numerous other advantages.

    • hjconstas4 hours ago
      Yeah I see that. But for me it’s more about everything just working. What kind of firewall rules do you have? Maybe that's not the best question to ask on the open internet haha.

      I'm coming at it from a more basic NPC angle after ChatGPT started blocking VPN IP traffic. So I'd love to hear a more nuanced angle.

      • JohnFen2 hours ago
        The part of my firewall setup I most wanted to extend to my smartphone was my policy of whitelisting outgoing communications. I don't want applications to be able to talk to the outside world without me explicitly allowing it, so I block all outgoing communications by default and whitelist specific things as needed.
  • fragmedean hour ago
    Tailscale makes it easy, including an Apple tv app to run an exit node from!
  • fuzzfactor4 hours ago
    Wanna party like it's 1999?

    Back when most entry-level Linksys routers were regular ordinary VPN routers?

    And they included built-in DynDNS functionality right in the router configuration routine if you wanted to use that too. In case you had a registered domain that you wanted to use for consistent remote access in the face of numerical IP addresses that were subject to change dynamically by your ISP.

    Plus of course DynDNS was free as originally intended with no end in sight.

    The main obstacle was configuring your remote Windows 98 laptop to make use of the VPN that the router handled on its own. About like configuring bare Wireguard before there was Tailscale.

    Eventually Cisco bought Linksys and it was all downhill from there.

    • hjconstas4 hours ago
      I didn't know the history there, that's cool! The functionality has kind of always been there, but it never felt like something you’d recommend to a normal person.

      I've been thinking about a project to make setting up a Tailscale-like setup dummy easy. Ik it's easy now, but trying to make it nord vpn easy. Considering you know what you're talking about, do you think this is a bad idea? It's niche enough that convincing people it's something they want will be a pain, and techies who know they want it, could just do it themselves. Am I being stupid here?