Super easy and free personal VPN - Zerotier

[pxr5]

Firstly, Zerotier is not a VPN like Nord or IPVanish which are used to create encrypted tunnels to remote servers for on-line security or by-passing geo-restrictions so you can watch Netflix US in the UK for example. Instead Zerotier is a personal VPN which creates your own private LAN, which is accessible from anywhere in the world with pretty much any device and appears, and works, just like you are on your home LAN. So it's really useful for accessing files at home or movies or music servers available on your LAN. I know there are VPN Servers you can run from home for things like this e.g. VPNServer on Synology NAS - but this normally involves opening ports on your router and is all a bit complicated really.

Zerotier takes minutes to set up. Simply register an account at Zerotier, create your unique network, get the Zerotier client on your device and connect to that network. And that's it. I did it yesterday and now I've got my small VPN set up with 4 devices (a PC, my phone, my NAS and a Raspberry Pi) all connected in their own LAN. On my phone I can just run any music playback app that can access a LAN and point it at my Zerotier VPN network, where my NAS is sharing out a music folder, and securely stream my own tunes saved at home. I had it all running through my car using Android Auto and with it I could access my music on my LAN at home while driving about. I'm not sure how good it will be with large movie files, but that mainly depends on the speed of the network you are connected to.

Zerotier themselves calls it a Global Area Server and their spiel:  "Connect team members from anywhere in the world on any device. ZeroTier creates secure networks between on-premise, cloud, desktop, and mobile devices." As I indicated there are apps/programs for NAS, Android, Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi - I'm sure there are many others. A great and really useful tool:

https://www.zerotier.com/


Here is a pic of my network from the Zerotier website. As you can see the LAN network range (all automatically created, but changeable) is 173.23.0.0/16 and each device has been allocated an IP address in that range. I've blanked some personal info, but at the far right is the Physical Address, i.e. the WAN, which are all the same as they are all off my home router. Of course if I go out with my phone that IP address would change but it would still be connected to the virtual LAN on 172.23.x.x.

[pxr5]

A very frustrating afternoon today trying to get wireless Android Auto working in my car. Each time I tried to connect AA it threw up a VPN Comms error. I have OpenVPN and my VPN providers apps installed on my phone, so I uninstalled both. No joy, so I gave up and came inside to do some research. It turns out that Zerotier was causing the problem (though I don't see it as a VPN as such) and disconnecting allowed wireless AA to eventually work. This problem has been raised on Github with a promise to fix; but this was a while ago and nothing has been done yet. Thing is I need Zerotier working to access my music remotely from my phone, so disconnecting it to run AA is an issue for me.

Anyway as I was researching this issue someone commented that Tailscale had had the same issue and has since been fixed. So I've installed that now instead. On the surface it seems to work exactly like Zerotier, but uses different protocols. So I put Tailscale on my phone, laptop and music NAS (I'll do my Raspberry Pis tomorrow). I had to allow the Tailscale IP and subnet through my NAS' firewall and everything works fine so far.

I'll keep an eye on Zerotier for a future fixes and I may revert to that, but Tailscale seems just as good so far.

[The Picnic Wasp]

I wish I'd been taught all this stuff years ago.😢

[Fishy]

My vpn back to home on my ASUS  router won't connect..got fish junior to reboot the router but no joy.. bit annoying as no other way to get back home network wise..