[Discuss] VPN and DDNS

[John Blomfield]

Solved!

I should perhaps have renamed this topic "SSH and DDNS" because I have 
given up on VPN.

I have now come up with a working system that may be of interest to 
others. I remembered that I had a Raspberry Pi board for plus a nice 
purpose molded plastic case, sitting in a draw waiting for me to think 
up something useful to do with it. Its very low power from both a 
computing power and electric power point of view and perfect for my 
personal cloud server. It runs Raspbian (Debian LXDE) has two USB 2.0 
ports, one Ethernet port, HDMI, RAM 128MB, Graphic Memory 128MB and an 
SD Card slot. Power consumption 5V at 700mA. You couldn't get more basic 
than that! But would it do the job? A neighbour agree to let me use 
their wifi network access to test remote access to my router. As I 
described before I obtained a DDNS from freedns.afraid.org and port 
forwarded port 22 to the Raspberry Pi IP address on my LAN. I can of 
course ssh the R'Pi from my desktop and they are on my LAN.

The remote access via my neighbour's wifi worked fine although the 
distance from my house to their's was on the limit of an effective 
signal. But I got a better signal strength from the greenhouse in my 
garden. The Dolphin file manager on my laptop came up quite quickly and 
moving through the file tree was quick but access files was fairly slow 
compared to being on my own LAN. The R'Pi has no hard drive or SSD just 
an SD Card. I also tried using a portable USB hard drive which again was 
ok on my LAN. Remote access to files on the SD card (6) was at about 60 
to 75kB/s and for the USB hard drive about 50 to 60kB/s. The SD Card is 
only 4GB just enough for the OS and bit more, so I plan to try a faster 
32GB SD card (10) that I have in my draw.

Once Raspberry pi is setup it does not of course need to have a monitor, 
keyboard or mouse connected to it, just an Ethernet cable and power. 
It's case is only 1" x 3" x 4" and can sit quietly next to my router.

Free Dropbox is only 2GB so I should have at least 25GB of useable Cloud 
storage on the 32GB card. My next question is how reliable will my 
system be compared to Dropbox. My first thoughts are these:

1) A power outage at home would interrupt my Cloud but I could add a UPS 
for my router /cable modem/Raspberry Pi. The R'Pi does not have an 
ON/OFF power switch so as soon as its plugged in it boots (same applies 
to router /modem). It is also set to automatic login so once power is 
restored it is quickly back in action.

2) There is no web interface for access to my files as is the case with 
Dropbox. That means I have to be able to find a computer that allows me 
to ssh. I could possibly overcome that with "Portable Apps" on Windows 
machines along with my password manager Keepassx and other Linux 
friendly apps I need. Again you need someone to let you plug a USB drive 
into their Windows box.

3) One of my objectives was avoid a) running my Desktop while away as it 
uses lots of power and gets pretty hot (probably time it was replaced 
with a more modern low power system) b) avoid connecting my Desktop via 
port 22 to the WAN and restrict vulnerability to a small pc (Raspberry 
Pi) with files for remote access available on an encrypted partition.

4) Dropbox allows you to provide a download link to a file to a friend. 
Not sure how I could provide that, without adding an ftp or http server. 
Probably keep Dropbox for that sort of use. For a knowledgeable trusted 
friend I could provide them with separate login user name and password, 
if they knew how to SSH.

In summary I think my Cloud may have the edge over Dropbox. Its hard to 
cover every possible what ifs!

I would appreciate any feed back on my plan. I am sure there are more 
holes I need to plug.


John



On 09/23/2014 10:01 PM, John Blomfield wrote:
> After a bit of thrashing about, reading and some tests, I think I 
> shall go with ssh, my Dynamic DNS and port forwarding port 22 to my 
> desktop LAN IP, rather than VPN which is more complicated to setup. 
> This seems to work well, giving me access to any file folder on my 
> desktop box. I can use Dolphin to add a network link on my client 
> laptop with the "fish" protocol. Nautilus does something similar. My 
> only hesitation is that it opens up port 22 on my router. My router 
> DDNS or IP is probably easy to discover so my only protection is my 
> login user password and root password.
>
> As an alternative I am thinking about adding a low power mini pc with 
> a large storage drive with a separated LAN IP to act basically as a 
> private cloud / storage / backup drive. Then I could have separate 
> passwords for that OS, keeping it one step away from my desktop 
> computer. Links to the storage mini pc would be one way from LAN 
> computers to the mini pc but not the reverse. There are some "cloud" 
> drives produced by Western Digital and others, that do basically what 
> I am describing but details are poor about the computer hardware or OS 
> it runs but it is reported that is Linux.
>
> Is this logic sound???
>
> John
>
>
> On 09/23/2014 10:49 AM, Lionel Widdifield wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 08:34:40AM -0700, John Blomfield wrote:
>>> Ok! I have now got a DDNS setup from FreeDNS. Next step to chose a VPN.
>>> Several of the previously free VPN providers are now charging or run 
>>> out
>>> of money or resources, so I am looking at NeoRouter and OpenVPN. Anyone
>>> any thoughts? Anybody?
>>
>>   Step 1) Find the resource aka DynDNS or remember the home IP number
>>
>>   Step 2) File Access
>>
>>    do you move files in/out or need access for a application to 
>> read/write?
>>
>>   the first you can do with ssh/scp, an http/ftp server and/or your 
>> owncloud
>> server.
>>
>>   the second would require ssh port forwarding and/or a VPN and/or 
>> samba/NFS/ etc..
>>
>>
>>
>>   A VPN provider gives you an exit point. Usually for Netfix USA 
>> access or
>> BBC portal. ;)
>>
>>
>>
>
>


-- 
John Blomfield
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Old John B's Linux Notes http://www.oldjohnbslinux.wordpress.com