Please help me. I would like to be able to connect to my home NAS (Synology or QNAP) from my personal laptop while I’m at work. I have the Synology drive mapped on my laptop.
I have a paid subscription to a commercial VPN (express, strong, etc, I don’t remember right off hand which one). I understand that it might be possible to run this VPN on my ASUS router so I could connect to anything in my network, in theory, instead of individually on Synology and individually on QNAP. But I just cannot figure out what to do. Could any kind soul please help me?
No no no. Your commercial VPN is not meant to access your home, it ends at the provider’s exit node and (somewhat) guarantees safe travel up to there. Your NAS applet enables your home network to do the same, but it’s absolutely not what you need.
You need
VPN server in your home network (router, nas or other pc
Add the VPN package from the package center, and use the Open VPN option. I use this all the time, and the side benefit is you can also access your LAN - for instance on my laptop I can use Remote Desktop to get to my home desktop device just through the Synology VPN.
Your router might have a VPN function that allows it to set up an OpenVPN server. Then you setup the OpenVPN client on whatever device you want to access your NAS (or anything else on your home network). That’s how I do it.
The way I do it is to first set up DDNS, so you’ll have something like XYZ.synology.me always pointing to your NAS. Second, configure VPN on the NAS. I’d start by enabling everything; once you get it working remove the unneeded stuff. Then you’ll need to open the VPN port(s) to the internet – this is a little scary but this will be the only open port to the outside world from your router and the software is well tested. Last you configure your VPN client to communicate with the DNS entry you set up above. It takes some fiddling, but use the logs to see how far you’re getting.
VPN is a generic term for a concept-- you establish an encrypted connection with somewhere else, that connection acts like a long Ethernet cable so you can pass other unrelated traffic over it.
A commercial VPN is just there to get you privacy. You tunnel your Internet usage through the VPN, they mix it up with everyone else’s Internet usage, and thus the websites you visit can only see that you’re using a VPN, not where you actually are in the world. Just the same, your ISP can’t see what you’re doing, only that you’re passing encrypted traffic. So as long as you trust your VPN provider it’s a great way to ensure privacy.
You need a remote access VPN. That is something that your router may do. How specifically you do this will depend on your router. The remote access VPN tunnels your Internet traffic back to your home, so as far as the Internet is concerned, you are home. That also means you can access the other stuff on your home network.
To get this started, read the documentation for your router. Follow those directions for VPN setup.
You can use Netmaker for this, there’s a few Synology tutorials out there to get it done. It’s more complicated to set up but the connection speed will be a lot faster than some other solutions mentioned, so depends on what you need.
You would set up a VPN server on your router and VPN client connection on your laptop. Beware that you are exposing your network to the internet by doing this, so be sure to study up on how to do this securely. There are lots of YouTube videos to start with.
Doesn’t the Synology vpn create a new subnet for vpn devices? So your internet traffic flows home, but it’s not like your in the same local network. How do u get to your home subnet this way?