Need VPN for foreign travel

[JimS]

I have a trip to China and want to set up a VPN for my phone. I have openVPN set up for access to my home network - a server in the cloud and a client on the phone and a client on my pfsense router. I could just buy a vpn solution but wondering if I can tweak my openVPN set up to route internet through the VPN. Currently only ip addresses on my home network are routed through my VPN.

 

[ano]

VPNs are illegal in China and most don't work. That's not to say you can't use one that works, but you are risking breaking the law in a communist country. Foreigners are arrested for spying, so use a VPN at your own risk.

 

[myyaz33]

would something like Tailscale fill the need? it appears it could also be blocked by the great firewall, but tailscale is not a textbook definition of a VPN.

 

[sic0048]

I would think that using your existing setup to access your home network is exactly what you want to use in China. Because you'll be routing through your actual home network's public IP address, it is unlikely that it would be filtered out by the great firewall. Although it seems that people are successful using a paid VPN service while in China, the fact that these services have to use publicly known IP addresses make it easier for the government to block access to those services.

Just make sure you haven't geo-blocked China from your home network or you'll inadvertently prevent yourself from being able to connect to your home VPN service while you are over there. I would also make sure I knew my local network's public IP address and not rely on DNS forwarding services (like DynDNS) because there is always a chance those DNS forwarding services would be blocked by the great firewall.

Take a look at this article. It seems to have some good information about using VPNs in China. https://www.privacyjournal.net/are-vpns-legal-in-china/#:~:text=What is the punishment for,find it on your device.

 

[JimS]

I don't really want to route all my traffic through the home network but I suppose I could - it would probably slow things down so didn't plan on doing that. Currently When I am connected to the home VPN the home traffic goes to the home network and the other internet traffic goes directly to the internet. I checked my IP on and off the VPN and my IP didn't change. Wondering how to change that and thinking I might be able to do that on the cloud server so it's ip is used. I need to dig into the configuration a bit.