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XrayDoc88

New Around Here
I own a home in Colorado and a second home in Utah. I'm considering creating a site to site vpn between the homes. I'm not that concerned about hiding my ip address. Here are my questions:

1. Can I do this for free without using a vpn hosting service?
2. Once this is set up correctly, will I be able to see computers in both locations as if on a local network?
3. When I am outside my local network, will I be able to remotely connect to either home with a vpn connection, or will this require using an outside vpn hosting service?
4. I love computer gaming. Will a site to site vpn cause any additional lag from either home when gaming on the internet? Or is this only an issue when you're using an outside hosting service?
5. The local network in Colorado is currently using 192.168.0.X for ip addresses. Should the Utah network be set up identically with unique IPs or with 192.168.1.X?
 
1) You will be configuring a VPN server at one location and a VPN client at the other location. You won't be using any third party VPN provider there since you will be running both ends yourself.

2) Yes and no. You won't be able to see all computers appear in the computer browser, however you will be able to reach them by their IP addresses

3) That will require you having a VPN server at BOTH location. Technically possible, but you are starting to complicate your network setup there. Again, no VPN provider involved (I hate that these still use the word "VPN" in their name BTW, since they do NOT provide a Private Network, they merely do traffic routing through their server. A more accurate name would be "Traffic tunnels", not "VPN"...)

4) No impact, only LAN traffic gets routed through the tunnel, all Internet traffic goes straight out

5) Personally I recommend using different subnets to avoid conflicts. You will just need the VPN to have a route pointing at the remote network.
 
Thank you so much for the very quick reply. Let me clarify about question 3. Perhaps I don't need to be able to connect to each home separately.

1. Would connecting to the vpn server home remotely allow me to see the vpn client home computers anyway?
2. Also, would a remote connection just allow me to see the shares on computers in both locations? Or does remote desktop work remotely?
3. If I am inside my local network in the Colorado home, does remote desktop work by ip address to the Utah computers?

Thanks again.
 
Would connecting to the vpn server home remotely allow me to see the vpn client home computers anyway?

Provided you get a route to that second LAN pushed to your client. Not really the type of setup I ever tried, so I'm not 100% sure what would be involved.

Same with 2 and 3 - it will probably just require that the server pushes routes to both LANs to your remote client, so the router can route that traffic. Accessing shares or RDP by their IP should work then - in theory.
 

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