I’m looking at upgrading my home network and looking at Asus routers. I noticed that the new ones come with a VPN service called Instant Guard. Seems that you can surf on your phone like you are actually at home.
Has anyone had experience with this, if this works to control Home Assistant remotely while away from home? I.e. as an alternative to Nabu Casa or using Wireguard add-in?
Looks like it relies on Asus’s DDNS servers to find your public IP address. That’s the weakest link. Using their in house DDNS servers.
If you set up any VPN you need some way of finding the public IP address of your router as it is most likely dynamically assigned by your ISP and can change at any time. DDNS solves this issue.
Whether you use Open VPN and a service like DuckDNS or DYDNS or Asus’s DDNS and their VPN it is probably pretty much all the same security wise. Better than port forwarding for sure. But I think I’d rather trust DuckDNS than Asus.
And yes you should be able to easily connect to home assistant (or anything else on your home network) using this VPN.
* I’m not an IP security expert.
Thanks! I’m just getting started with figuring out Home Assistant, and was planning to try the DuckDNS way (though I’m not super proficient with configuring network stuff). This Asus service isn’t necessarily a reason I would buy one of their routers, but looked like it could be a bonus to solve this remote use Home Assistant in a simple way for layman like me. At least it seems simple enough… download the app and turn it on to connect from home.
Perhaps one day I will try this out this DuckDNS method though.
I’m using DuckDNS and WireGuard addons to do what you want. My phone is 24/7 connected using WireGuard VPN so it’s like I’m home 24/7. All I add to do is open a port on my router