2wire router forgot my port forward for Elk

[mikefamig]

Personally why bother anymore with this stuff. 
 
What is it you are using on the internet to get to your home Elk panel?
 
If you are using a PDA phone then configure it with an encrypted tunnel to your home network Elk device. 
 
It is easy to do this these days.
 
1 - Buy a cheapo ($20) TP-Link micro router and update it with Open-Wrt
2 - power it with the Elk
3 - install OpenVPN on the Open-WRT OS
4 - configure your firewall to pass a VPN tunnel from the TP-Link VPN
5 - configure the Open-WRT firewall to pass whatever you want to the local network
 
Personally here my microrouter inside of my OPII can has not melted running 24/7 now for a while.

 
You take a lot of knowledge for granted. I have never heard of Open-Wrt and not familiar with Open VPN. I'll have to do som ereading around the net and see what I can learn. Generally speaking I am against adding devices to the system because if anything happens to me my wife needs to still be able to run the house. I was even thinking of using cloud to access the elk so that it is not dependent on any custom router settings at all. I subscribe to the KISS principal.
 
Mike.

 

[pete_c]

Apologies Mike.
 
You can run the firewall / Open-WRT - micro router off of the Elk Power supply / back up.  Configure the access from your internal LAN as you have it today and just run the software for OpenVPN right on the tiny low powered device.  Well too if you need to create a second ingress failover to the the Elk; you can add a on demand 4G/5G connection to the device; kind of a 2015 out of band management device.  The device (micro router) would add redundancy and resilence to the Elk M1 and its only $20.  Very small footprint device.  Even has wireless built in.
 
Read about OpenWRT here.
 
Read about running OpenVPN on OpenWRT here.
 
You set it up once and never touch it.   You can even purchase two microrouters; leave off and configured and keep it as a hot spare.

 

[mikefamig]

I also found this message thread and will be looking into this
 
http://cocoontech.com/forums/topic/26386-want-to-setup-a-home-vpn/?hl=%20vpn%20%20home
 
Mike

 

[pete_c]

Much easier these days than even when the OP started....

 

[mikefamig]

Much easier these days than even when the OP started....

 
It's springtime and I'll be very busy with outside chores for a while before I do any work on the system. I do all of my own landscaping and we have a pool to open and a garden to put in and some work in the garage and so on. The security and automation has been running great and will have to wait for a while. Before the VPN router I'll be installing surge protection on the cables between the garage and house and then maybe the VPN.
 
Mike.

 

[pete_c]

Good news Mike. 
 
Yeah here started outside stuff week before last; then we had snow....
 
Play around with OpenWRT.  You can install it on just about any router (if you have an old one sitting around).
 
Goofing around today with OpenWrt noticed a new firmware update posted today April 8, 2015.
 
Installed the three applications required for OpenVPN
 
1 - luci-app-openvpn
2 - openvpn-easy-rsa
3 - openvpn-openssl
 
The Luci application provides a nice gui for configuration.