[ale] SSH tunnel vs VPN

Alex Carver agcarver+ale at acarver.net
Fri Nov 6 12:46:30 EST 2015


Yeah, I saw that yesterday.  I don't browse very often on my phone and
when I do it's to a very select number of sites (e.g. NWS, work webmail
portal, and a couple large news pages) but it would be handy for
browsing strange things on the road.  However, I do have Firefox Android
set up to use SOCKS via Connectbot so I have that as an option although
my upstream at home is slow.

On 2015-11-06 09:24, DJ-Pfulio wrote:
> Everyone here needs a VPN running at their home,  if just for cell phone
> privacy. You may also need another VPN at some cloud provider if AT&T
> is  your  ISP.
> 
> http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/11/user-data-plundering-by-android-and-ios-apps-is-as-rampant-as-you-suspected/
> 
> Check the comments from the guy running pfsense with snort filtering. My
> next project. Definitely RTFA too.
> 
> 
> 
> On 11/06/2015 10:37 AM, Alex Carver wrote:
>> I'm once again mildly pondering a VPN for home use but I wonder if it's
>> worth the effort over just having SSH with tunnels.
>>
>> The main purpose for either one is to let me get back to my home network
>> from my phone so I can do things like view security cameras, check/send
>> email, and some other minor things.
>>
>> As far as I can tell from the documents, I only need to open a UDP port
>> inbound on the firewall to establish the connection because the server
>> should then set up an outbound connection back to the client (solving
>> the NAT traversal and stateful firewall issues, please correct me if I'm
>> wrong on this).
>>
>> Is it actually worth the setup or should I just stick with SSH?  The
>> current setup is an Android phone with ConnectBot and a bunch of
>> tunnels.  If I were to go VPN I would get a new machine (likely a SBC
>> like a RasPi) to be the server, the firewall is still a separate device.



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