Linking HA's over WAN

Configuration
1

I have just been playing around with the home-assistant-remote HACS from @lukas-hetzenecker but I’m trying to get working over WAN with duckdns and long time tokens - but it doesn’t work so I start wondering:

  1. Does it even work over WAN?
  2. Should I create a VPN connection to get it up and working?

My case is like this:
I have little internet connected shed in the country side and I have a heater at that place that I would like to toggle on when I’m on my way to this small shed. I have a well running HA at home with iOS present detection and geofencing and it would be nice to get the heater entity from the shed being shown in my Home HA and maybe later having the geofencing toggle the heating on when I’m on my way to the shed.

I have tried to setup the OpenVPN client addon and no luck getting that to work - I have a running OpenVPN server at the remote site but how do I get in touch with that from my home HA?

2

Exposing your HA to the WAN though firewall port forwarding would be the way although not recommended (Exposing any internal service to the public WAN should always be avoided if you can), better to use a site to site VPN.

3

Try setting up the VPN outbound connection from your router rather than your HA device!

1 Like
4

I use openvpn on a pi which also runs HA in a virtual env.

I found this to be a an easy starting point.

https://pivpn.dev/

1 Like
5

I will give it a try but isn’t there an OpenVPN client suitable for a hassio device ?