VPN Access To A Remote Observatory

Sequence Generator
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If you are considering deploying a remote observatory, you may find having Virtual Private Network (VPN) access to that observatory very useful. Installing a VPN can, however, be a bit of a challenge. VPN routers can be rather expensive and some require the purchase of a special VPN client.

The TP-Link ER605 Gigabit VPN router is a high quality, low cost ($60) router that can be configured to work well with the free VPN client that comes with Windows 10 / 11.

The biggest challenge to deploying an observatory VPN is getting the router and the client properly configured since many routers have little or poorly written documentation. To address this problem, I have created detailed documentation on how to configure both the ER605 VPN router and the Windows VPN client.

If interested, you can download that documentation from my Dropbox:

ER605 Setup

Charlie

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Charlie, thanks for doing this. I wanted to set up a VPN to my remote observatory so this is perfect timing.
I didn’t know what L2TP was so looked it up. Several sources said it was old and being deprecated in many cases. Have you tried using a newer, more secure and more efficient protocol?

Eric

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@EricC

The L2TP protocol has been around for a long time but it is certainly not obsolete. If you were a bank deploying a VPN for your employees, you would use a more complex protocol and a $5000 Cisco router. But for connecting a home computer to an observatory computer, this is way more than adequate.

Charlie