First of all I know express is not the best VPN, i’ve been wanting to change for the past year.
Now seems like the time is finally here to switch VPNs, or not…
My question is what VPNs work for routers that are privacy friendly?
Do you recommend installing VPN apps on separate devices instead of the router?
What VPNs?
How do you use your VPN at home?
Should I stick with Express and get a new 300$ router? (i’d rather not)
mulvad on a router? iVPN?
Advice, thoughts?
EDIT: my router is a Linksys WRT3200ACM
You must log in or # to comment.
I wouldn’t bother with a VPN honestly
How did you exactly install Express on the router? Did you use an app or something of that kind?
If the VPN provider has WireGuard support, you may wanna use a wireguard client software to connect to it. Flash OpenWRT on the router, install and configure a wireguard interface that connects to Express, then forward packets from behind LAN to that interface so they go through the VPN tunnel. A bit tricky for beginners, but I hope you can make it.
Since OpenVPN protocol seems to become unsupported in the future, Wireguard should be the way to go. Mullvad/IVPN should also support it, and once you know how to set it up it should be usable across many services and devices.
Do you recommend installing VPN apps on separate devices instead of the router?
For flexibility I’d do this. In case I’d wanna switch upstream servers for a single device without affecting others.
My router is just a Protectli Vault mini PC with Alpine Linux. You can essentially pick your favorite Linux (or BSD) distro and make it a router.
Those Protectli Vaults are neat little devices.
They killed off openvpn support a few years ago and am glad I did. They don’t care about power users, so they don’t care about my money either. Good riddance
Really? I’ve been using ExpressVPN on my torrent box with an OpenVPN client for years. It’s still working today.
I know they’re not the best, but I’ve been too lazy to switch on that device.
I exclusively use my router as the VPN client for a few reasons. There are multiple services on my network that use the VPN. I’ve got static routes configured which effectively act as a kill switch and I can use QOS to prioritize traffic. It’s pretty much set it and forget it. You can use any VPN service as long at they offer a protocol your router supports. I use Proton via WireGuard and have for years.
So, how do you change the IP of your VPN on the router if say, you wanted to unblock something that was geoblocked, other than manually on the router’s WUI? Curious, since I have read of people deploying a VPN on the router. Do you just pick a location and go with it? I’ve always have enjoyed the option to change geographical locations on the fly, from the device app.
It definitely makes it more difficult to switch endpoints manually. I have multiple VPN connections with different exit nodes configured for failover in case one (or more) of them is unreachable. I don’t run into geoblocking issues very often but I also don’t route all my WAN traffic over VPN. Just some of it.
What you can automate depends on your routers capabilities. Mine is a Mikrotik which does have fairly extensive support for custom scripts. However, detecting Geoblocking is probably going to involve parsing HTTP responses which is beyond the capabilities of almost all consumer grade routers. You would have to effectively do a MITM attack (aka deep packet inspection) in order to accomplish that on something other than the client device.
TLDR: I manually change routes to a different VPN if needed but I very rarely run into Geoblocking issues.
