In fact, many people will immediately ask: why do we need a VPN at home? For me, as a person who is often out of the house is the basic functionality. If you are traveling, you usually do everything to keep your luggage from weighing tons. That is why the computer you have with you is supposed to be light, and therefore rather of medium parameters. And if you are a freelancer, traveling with a PC is not possible. That’s why I usually have a mid-class laptop, and if there is a need I connect my home where I have a PC that has the necessary power resources.
In combination with, for example, the Vmware workstation, which I am a passionate fan of, you can create the perfect solution and environment to work as a freelancer, from anywhere in the world. VPN at home is the first piece of the puzzle and the first article in the series.

What is VPN?

I am not going to bore you with technicians, so briefly. A VPN or virtual private network is simply an encrypted tunnel between your computer and a device. Due to the fact that we are talking about VPN at home, in this case, will be a router that will stand in your apartment. There are other solutions of this type, which are usually designed to hide our identity or to provide us with privacy, but today we will not talk about it. If someone wants to read more, start with Wikipedia for example

How do you set up a VPN at home?

Contrary to what it may seem, it is not somehow complicated. I will show you on the example of the Netgear R7800 router, which I really appreciate how to do it. By the way, I have already written about the advantages of this model. The first thing that you will need is a public IP address. Of course, there is something like Dynamic DNS, but it is a problematic solution to use, and what’s more, you usually have to pay to have full functionality. With a fixed IP address, everything works for you 🙂 .

The first step is to enable the service in our router. In the case of R7800, this is to mark the “Enable VPN Service” checkbox and save changes.

Now all you have to do is download the configuration files for Windows and all this when it comes to the configuration on the router’s side. Of course, for a different operating system, we take a different configuration. It’s time to install the OpenVPN client on our computer. We download it from this page – CUSTOMER.
Now it’s time for OpenVPN installations, which basically boils down to clicking on. The client created a network card in the system that will be used to make calls. What is important, remember to change the name of this card to “NETGEAR-VPN”. Without this connection will fail! In general, instructions on how to configure OpenVPN can be found on your router’s website, where you have enabled the VPN service.
The last step is to unpack the downloaded configuration and copy its contents to the configuration folders.By default it’s “C: \ Program files \ OpenVPN \ config”

Time to test your VPN at home

Time for tests. By default, OpenVPN will run with Windows. Now, right-click and select “Connect” and if you successfully connect it, the icon on the Windows bar will turn green.