Can I use Mullvad with my Router? If not, what is the best and cheapest for Router VPNs?
Thanks in Advance
“Usually” a router based VPN will pass all traffic through the VPN.
The only “router” that you have full control over is either knowing iptables (linux) or if you have pfSense CE. There is also pfSense Plus (hardware supplied by Rubicon Communications).
So it comes down to a couple of things;
- How much fine grade control do you want
- Are you happy to have all data flow go through the VPN in question.
I am going to assume this is pure for torrents only due to the name of this subreddit - so this might not be a good idea. A better way would be to use docker & a headless torrent client connected to a VPN container (example gluetun-wiki/setup/connect-a-container-to-gluetun.md at main · qdm12/gluetun-wiki · GitHub )
It won’t be a good idea cause if you do any form of online banking it will trigger their security systems to lock down if your IP is not from your own country. This happened to my step mum when she was using my Mullvad account on her iPad to watch some Danish TV shows and then later forgot to disconnect it and logged into her bank. It locked her account down and she had to call to get the lock lifted.
In short - not enough info given to give a proper reply as you haven’t stated full use case.
Yes. They have guides on their website for routers
There is also what’s called policy based routing at the router level, which is awesome. With PFSense you can simply create a rule for a specific host and have it route that hosts traffic through the VPN. Want others? just add them to the rule via an alias, and done.
I use pfSense installed on a Protectlii PC that I have connected to Mullvad. OPNsense is another similar option. As mentioned above, routing all traffic through VPN isn’t going to work for most people, but you can assign the VPN connection to certain VLAN networks as well as having certain addresses use your regular WAN connection.
I used this guide in case it helps. pfSense baseline guide with VPN, Guest and VLAN support
I will be the first to admit that this gets kind of complex. There is another web post that is similar to this one, but they used OPNsense. The nice thing was they used Mullvad for VPN instead. pfSense and OPNsense are very similar to configure where it was still useful. Don’t have link handy though.
Alternatively, another cheap option is to run OpenWRT firmware instead of pfSense. Very powerful, but I find it more complicated to use. OpenWRT does seem to run on older routers though if money is tight.
If you are using VPN just for torrenting, I agree with the prior recommendation that it is much easier to use Docker. Gluetun supports Mullvad’s WireGuard implementation which is really nice.
Good luck!
You can use OpenWRT with wireguard and an addon called policy routing on a nano pi r4s and route traffic to specific devices on your network to use the VPN. It works really well, it’s energy-efficient, and it’s budget-friendly. There are tons for guides online on how to do that. More specifically search the channel OneMarcFifty on youtube
Good luck
What router do you recommend? I have Gl.net but I am not happy with the option policy based routing on that… i have some sites that I can’t access with a vpn and for two times the gl net failed on that. So I am looking for a new option.