Remote connection via VPN - [Resolved] but ongoing discussion

Tinkering
52

Hi David,

I’m glad you got SoftEther to work! I could get it to work, but not reliably and it always wanted to gobble up my default route and make all Internet traffic slow as molasses. I installed a new version of Ubuntu, hosed out my firewall rules to a bare minimum, and made sure my FiOS router wasn’t interfering (disabled firewall, DMZ host was my Linux router), and no real change with or without SecureNAT enabled.

I finally threw the towel in on SoftEther for good today and refocused my attention to ZeroTier (free for individual use), but I went on ahead and subscribed to their $29/mo. plan as my wife’s a road warrior and I don’t want their service to go away.

With the help of zt-travs and zt-grant on the ZT Slack channel, I figured out what the issues were with ZeroTier that are, in my opinion, a little unorthodox, but probably necessary due to how they’re doing things.

We’re all here for L2 routing that makes the Roon streaming tick, so that’s what I’ll focus on.

In the past, when I’ve bridged two devices, the bridge device gets the IP/netmask/etc. info and the other devices get folded into the bridge. So, if you take a segment that has a DHCP server on it, and throw it together in a bridge device with clients that need IPs, the DHCP server gets used for any of the bridge devices (assuming no advanced measures were taken otherwise on the DHCP server).

Now, that’s what threw me with ZeroTier. They NEED to hand out the DHCP info whether or not you have your own DHCP server on your bridged LAN. So, here’s the pertinent settings that I used on their web UI to make my iPhone bridge:

  • Managed IP addresses, set to the same network and netmask as your home LAN that you want to bridge to.

  • Set IPv4 auto-assign range to a range of IPs that exist on your LAN (this is what threw me the most–it should’ve been using my existing DHCP server, given my past experience)

  • ZeroTier server (in your house, also referred to as the bridge, running the zerotier-one software): do not auto-assign IPs
    ** Set to bridge mode

  • Your client
    ** Set to bridge mode
    ** Set to auto-assign IPs

It was this last bit that enabled me to communicate with my network, including streaming Roon.

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