So basically, I will be away from home for several weeks. Unfortunately, this became the perfect time for our home router to start acting out and factory resetting itself. We are awaiting a new router for replacement, but the time is tight.
My stuff is ethernetted in, so that connectivity isn’t an issue - the issue is that I couldn’t actually connect to the router to restore services even if it had internet by fixing all the settings including port forwarding.
What I would like would be the ability to have a VPN perhaps connected to my homelab, so I can hop on the router and restore the settings if this issue happens while I’m away. Any ideas?
Without a secondary internet connection this isn’t possible.
The router is the connection - its the gateway (a term we don’t hear much these days).
You could setup an independent connection via a cell modem - becoming a secondary connection. This is common for remote locations or even small businesses that need a failover just for management.
You could even have it on a single machine and have a vpn there. Then you could RDP/VNC to that one machine and manage things from there. I’ve done the VPN this way with Tailscale. One machine has it (I’ve even done it with a Raspberry Pi), then you can RDP/VNC to other machines from there.
But there’s not much I could see you doing if the gateway is down anyway.
if op still has connection, but the router just reset itself and closed all the ports, tailscale could help.
but yeah if the connection goes down, there’s no way in.
Even with something like no-ip, which some routers support, if the gateway is down, nothing is going to happen.