Currently, I have two VPN clients on most of my devices:

  • One for connecting to a LAN
  • One commercial VPN for privacy reasons

I usually stay connected to the commercial VPN on all my devices, unless I need to access something on that LAN.

This setup has a few drawbacks:

  • Most commercial VPN providers have a limit on the number of simulations connected clients
  • I either obfuscate my IP or am able to access resources on that LAN, including my Pi-Hole fur custom DNS-based blocking

One possible solution for this would be to route all internet traffic through a VPN client on the router in the LAN and figuring out how to still be able to at least have a port open for the VPN docker container allowing access to the LAN. But then the ability to split tunnel around that would be pretty hard to achieve.

I want to be able to connect to a VPN host container on the LAN, which in turn routes all internet traffic through another VPN client container while allowing LAN traffic, but still be able to split tunnel specific applications on my Android/Linux/iOS devices.

Basically this:

   +---------------------+ internet traffic   +--------------------+           
   |                     | remote LAN traffic |                    |           
   | Client              |------------------->|VPN Host Container  |           
   | (Android/iOS/Linux) |                    |in remote LAN       |           
   |                     |                    |                    |           
   +---------------------+                    +--------------------+           
                      |                         |     |                        
                      |       remote LAN traffic|     | internet traffic       
split tunneled traffic|                 |--------     |                        
                      |                 |             v                        
                      v                 |         +---------------------------+
  +---------------------+               v         |                           |
  | regular LAN or      |     +-----------+       | VPN Client Container      |
  | internet connection |     |remote LAN |       | connects to commercial VPN|
  +---------------------+     +-----------+       |                           |
                                                  |                           |
                                                  +---------------------------+

Any recommendations on how to achieve this, especially considering client apps for Android and iOS with the ability to split tunnel per application?

Update:

Got it by following this guide.

Ended up modifying this setup to have better control over potential IP leakage

  • @[email protected]English
    1•5 months ago

    Even after you get your ideal setup with all your traffic transversing your network to a single host, you have bottle necked the whole network to the speed of that single host.

    Usually in networks devices are able to talk to each other directly across switch fabrics and not interdesr with other traffic.

    Say you have four devices A B C D each pair trying to send 1GiB/S of traffic to each other over a GbE network connected to the same switch. A,B gets 1 GbE and C,D gets 1 GbE. For a total concurrent speed of 2GbE.

    In your model since all traffic has to hit the central wireguard node W first you can only get 1GbE speed concurrently

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      2•5 months ago

      Oh I’m fully aware. I personally don’t care, but one could add a capable VPS and deploy the Wireguard Host Container + two Client Containers, one for the LAN and one for the commercial VPN (like so), if the internet connection of the LAN in question isn’t sufficient.