Orbi router RBR20 - how do I access a PC on home network while away from home

[bohdanf]

Hi,

I apologise if this is a topic that has been asked before, I cannot find it, if so.

I have a Mesh WiFi setup, an RBR20 router, with two RBS20 satellite units. I have connected a small (8-port) switch, via a LAN cable, to the Ethernet port on the router. I can also connect the switch to an Ethernet port on one of the satellite units, all works fine. I can network a couple of servers I have this way, and I connect to them from my laptop.

The servers and my laptop are running Linux, but access to the servers is fine. Ping.ssh etc al works flawlessly.

My question, and I do not know how to do this, is I want to be able to access one or both of my servers while away from home, again from my laptop. How can I do this?

After some research I stumbled upon the information to set up port forwarding on the router. As an example, say one of the servers has an IPMI function, say it has a fixed ip 192168.1.80 (just making the ip up). When I am at home I can connect to this IPMI function from my laptop browser with http://192.168.1.80.

But how can I then access the same port/ip when away from home - say from my work place? I setup Port forwarding on router for the IP, e,g, 192.168.1.90 or whatever it will be. But how do I then access this server IP remotely?

Many thanks for your help

[plemans]

I usually just user team viewer to remote log into one of my severs. and if I need to access the router, i teamviewer into the server and use its (the servers) browser to access it

[CrimpOn]

There are two methods to connect to devices on the LAN from the internet:

• Forward individual ports through the Orbi router to the device.  This relies on the device to provide security against improper access because once the port is open, it will be discovered almost immediately and interested parties will attempt to connect. Not necessarily hackers, but it's a big world and lots of people/organizations have the time and resources to investigate.
• Create an OpenVPN Host on the router which accepts connections from the Internet. (see page 122 of the user manual:
  https://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/RBK50/Orbi_UM_EN.pdf 
  This has the benefit of providing an encrypted tunnel through the internet that is secure.  The "downside" is that it is much more complicated to set up.

Both of these methods rely on the Orbi router having a public IP address.  i.e. it cannot be "behind" another router

[bohdanf]

Hi there, thanks for the reply. This is not quite the solution I was after but I will check this further, if there are no other easier options.

[bohdanf]

Hi there, thanks for the reply. This seems like the option that will work.

I have a Linux laptop I want to connect to my home servers. I can install OpenVPN client on the laptop.

I will try this.