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I have a box that I want access to from outside the office (Synology NAS). I don't need access to the rest of the subnet, just that box. For the moment it's to use a git repo, but some day maybe file shares and more.

My office sublets access to internet from the building. The building people are [shockingly] completely ignorant about networking. They can't confirm whether the office has a static IP (it probably doesn't), how to assign my box a static IP on their network, or how to forward a port.

So it doesn't really look like I can use this box as a VPN.

My next plan of attack is to have the box connect to an external VPN that I can also connect my client to. I don't want to host the VPN myself; I'd prefer to pay a reasonable rate for decent SLAs. The problem I have here is that every time I look for VPN service, all I can find is to support torrenters. Every. Single. One. They also seem to all be in countries on other continents. I'd like the speed gains that staying in America or even Silicon Valley would provide.

I also don't necessarily want all of my traffic coming off of the box to go through the VPN. I'd be happy if the box could listen for connections from the VPN and the local network, but all outbound traffic stay on the local network. I think that's supported by Synology's VPN client, but I'd like some confirmation before I start paying for a VPN service.

So I think this boils down to three questions:

  1. Will this setup work?

  2. How do I find a VPN provider that will give me my own network?

  3. Will my box still be able to connect to local machines while the VPN is on?

Hounshell
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2 Answers2

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  1. Provided that there is no firewall preventing the outgoing VPN connection of your NAS you should be able to connect the NAS to a VPN network using OpenVPN. Synology also supports PPTP but I'd recommend not using that.

  2. The NAS will also still be able to communicate with the local machines while connected to the VPN.

  3. Finding a VPN Provider for this will not be that easy as most of the VPN providers are - as you already found out - more like anonymizer services. Maybe someone else has a tip on this. If not it might be easier and not so time consuming to simply setup a VPS to host your VPN?

lsmooth
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Rent a VPS like digital ocean or linode. Create VPN server on VPS. Tunnel traffic from NAS to VPS. Port forward between VPS and NAS required public ports. Route local networks as needed.

user274562
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