Hi everyone,
I am looking for some advice on how to establish a private VPN on a macOS 10.15.4 machine that I use as a home server. Ideally, I would be able to use the VPN to access my home network whilst travelling with my laptop.
I have previously used macOS Server and the inbuilt VPN service, but this has been degraded from Mojave onwards.
Does anyone have any solutions or know of walkthrough guides?
Thanks!
I have openvpn running on a raspberry pi at home and it generally works great. If you’re comfortable with the command line it looks like openvpn is also available on homebrew, so you could probably get that up & running.
Sadly the VPN server in Catalina is broken and probably won’t be fixed since Apple doesn’t support using Macs as servers anymore. Apparently this works as a solution: http://cutedgesystems.com/software/openvpnenablerforcatalina/ Eventually I intend to replace my router with a Ubiquiti UniFi Security Gateway which has the VPN server functionality built-in and I won’t have to rely on running an old macOS release.
I’m thinking of using a Raspberry Pi for a Pi-hole instance - I wonder how well a VPN would work alongside it. (My first priority is switching to a WiFi6 mesh system by the end of the year, and I want to get settled in with that first, though.)
That’s what I’ve got right now. It’s also an airplay receiver.
It works fairly well, but from time to time it becomes unresponsive and I haven’t figured out why. Could be that its connected via Wifi, could be because its, (I think), the 2-nd oldest pi there is, with 512MB of RAM. Or I have something configured slightly wrong. Or it gets bumped wrong when the drawer it’s in opens & closes. I usually just power-cycle it when it happens. And, oddly enough, it sometimes won’t show me the Pi-Hole web interface or let me SSH in, but the VPN still works.
There’s an article on the Pi-Hole website on how to set it up as a VPN with Pi-Hole.
Maybe your router can act as a VPN server?
My ASUS router can: https://www.asus.com/en/support/faq/1008713/
I have the same at home. RaspPi with Pi-Hole and Wireguard. Works great. I can turn on wireguard on my devices when not at home and get ad blocking everywhere.
Thanks everyone - some great advice to follow here.