nas

Connecting securely to your home network has always been a bit of a challenge since common home ADSL routers not normally contain any VPN Servers (those which do contain such are generally PPTP servers which I would hardly call secure these days). Which is probably a good thing as they would be horribly out of date considering the firmware release policies of retail router manufacturers. You could run/maintain your own dedicated server, but for most home networks that is overkill and out of the technical depth of most hobbyists. However NAS Appliances are becoming more useful in home networks for storage and other common tasks. I have had good experiences with Synology NAS devices over a number of years and the latest iteration also has a very useful VPN Server package available based on OpenVPN (as most Synology Apps are common Open Source components). Server Requirements This is a very straight forward procedure via the Synology Web UI (http://www.synology.com/en-uk/support/tutorials/459#t3.2) Installing the VPN Server via Synology Package Manager Enabling OpenVPN Server Export the certificate using the button "Export configuration" (openvpn.zip) and extract the CA Certificate file (ca.crt) Forward UDP Port 1194 from your modem/router to the Synology NAS Make sure your Diskstation user account has OpenVPN privileges Android Client Configuration This part turned out a little more difficult than I expected. Initially I tried the "OpenVPN Connect" app by OpenVPN.net the makers of OpenVPN. However this seems to have no facility to edit the configuration and would not work at all…