I’ve got a homelab setup (nginx > media server, photo backup) in my home country at my parents house. Recently I moved to a different continent, and my parents ISP seems to have crappy international routing because it’s now too slow for streaming.
I noticed when NordVPNing thru my parent’s country the performance is back, but it’s a pain in the ass to activate and deactivate the VPN all the time on each device (especially for my family). Is there a way I can setup nginx to go through the VPN so all clients don’t have to?
Can’t you have both? Like the VPN on and select which app uses it?
Connect to the VPN in your firewall, route devices accordingly to “home base”.
You want your commercial vpn to support port forwarding. I don’t know which vpns support it nowadays — not even Mullvad.
Cloudflare’s reverse proxy should do a similar performance boost (for a much lower rate than web hosting), since they will always have good infrastructure. This is the route I would look into if I were you; have a look at Cloudflare’s services.
You could set up a split-tunnel vpn — but on most commercial devices, especially mobile phones, you can only have one vpn active at a time. Plus this is per device. As someone suggested, you could do this on your router, but are your devices always behind the same router?
I use Chrome or Safari to access the homelab, so not in this case
Ah so where I am now I setup a firewall and setup a rule where all traffic to homebase is through the vpn? That should work
pfsense + nordvpn works okay - i use it too
Yeah when you put it that way, makes sense. Using cloudflares proxy for CDN data like video is technically against TOS unless you use their paid Stream service, but I see some people getting away with it. In my case it’s just my household overseas with the trouble, so the firewall level VPN would work but i’ve only got a ISP router so worst case have to just deal with it