Just stumbled onto your channel looking for help turning my Pi into a VPN access point. What a treasure trove of information you've created here. Really impressive, thanks!
Your AirCard 320u also has two external antenna connectors hidden on its top edge. Recommend you get two suitable patch leads and a dual 4G antenna to optimise 4G reception from your car.
It seems everything gobbles bandwidth and processing time. Adding the VPN probably did this, which is likely the reason for the 2mb drop in performance. I imagine sending video from the dashcams to the home storage, should you do that, would also affect the throughput numbers. But, that is the fact of networking. I like the project!
No, the UDP encapsulation for the packets within the VPN tunnel really add very little. As demonstrated in the video, the performance hit comes from sharing the same RF channel for both uplink and downlink of the Raspberry Pi.
@@TradieTrev I could use one in the 2.4GHz band and one in 5GHz, but the fact is that this is enough for the purpose I plan on using it for so I'm not going to bother.
Didn't know you were building a van, but good choice! (hope your van build progresses faster than mine has been!) On the NM front, you can block devices to stop them being managed by NM, at which point you can resume using AT commands and the like. Not super convenient, but you might be able to use a bash script to knock the modem out of NM when you want to SMS, and then bring it back up afterwards....haven't tried it though, just a thought.
Very cool to see what you can piece together with free software and low cost hardware. Couple of questions: What OS are you running on your pi zero? If this is going to be powered via the van, are you bothered about the time it will take for the pi to boot up when you first turn the engine on? I had this issue when trying to use the zero to stream music from my home network with OpenVPN - I'd be driving for several minutes before being able to play a song. Out of curiosity, are you using a Pi for your VPN server at home? I believe later revisions of the Pi have a more powerful antenna compared to the zero, and you can get get a GSM hat, which might look a bit neater than your USB solution. Would be interesting to compare the performance with that setup versus what you have shown here. After all that effort, id be tempted to spend a few bucks more to see if if there are any performance gains to be had.
Just Raspbian or RaspiOS whatever it's called now. It does the job. I also plan it to be on constant power, as it will be a camper van with a full secondary power system.
Your open door looks like a Faraday cage to me. Add some metal shelves in that room and more metal bars/mesh on all windows and no wonder if you have bad reception. I have similar problems with metal shelving in my home lab. They pretty much block most of transmission to and from other parts of the house. Some creative antenna placement needed to solve that.
Great Video! I'm excited to see your 12v setup in a van. Are you planning on using a raspberry Pi with a touch screen interface to control and monitor all of your batteries and devices? Because that is something i'd love to see.
I am also doing this using a couple of older routers flashed with ddwrt, they setup an openvpn tunnel to my house, that said: i now have a voip connection back to my asterisk server from my car
Sounds a great future plan - please keep us informed with your #vanlife Love your comment on the Pi throughput - I get less than that from the fibre in the house 😢 As for send sms at the same time as internet - never found any device that would let me do it so moved over to using text service from textanywhere and messaging to iOS. Beard suits you by the way.
I already have a model S, so don't really need another one ;) Love the AP setup though. I did this for my oldies in their caravan back in the old days of no 3G...
Hey mate, set the pi Zero AP mode to 802.11N , G is garbage these days. I also recommend setting up wireguard instead of openVPN, in my testing in a similar scenario, it increased my speeds by about 10 megabit
It is 802.11n. G is just referring to the band, in this case 2.4GHz. The terminology of G or A is still used for the band no matter what modulation is going through it.
I really hope this helps me. I am wanting to do something like that on an OLD Raspi (2a) with WAP and am getting nowhere fast. On another front: Travel safe. All this CV-19 stuff going on. You may get stuck in a state (or territory) for longer than you like or want.
Great project, you would most likely get a couple of bucks promoting a vpn-provider with a setup where the clients are "secure" thru their vpn-service :-D . I have asked on other forums, with not a great deal of luck, are there good ways telling the clients that this network is metered ? For Android I know there is a dhcp option for this, but clients like windows and apple does not use this. By having this, you avoid syncing of dropbox/onedrive , updates etc..
for the modem set it to IP Firmware instead of LTE. This will give you 5 com ports. You can use 1 with a ppp(for data) and then another one you can use for AT commands for sms also grab some of the big pihole lists that will block windows update, adobe updates, telemetry, etc. This means no background data and should give you if not more MBps but atleast a more stable connection
Thanks for the tip there. I'd like to try it but am also cautious about breaking a working system. When you say IP firmware, do you mean totally different firmware for this modem device?
@@TallPaulTechdepends on the system i was using this modem on over 200 mikrotik routers for portable digital signs. Mikrotik call it IP Mode(as it can talk to the modem via USB to convert to Bridge), huawei call it stick mode. But the cool thing is i had the mikrotik polling the GPS co-ords sending an email/sms and a server at our data center would detect if the GPS co-ords have changed. If so we know someone has stolen the screen and would alert us. We could push new ads/remote access NUC via the ppp modem. If you're looking to travel Aus.. i wold actually purchase a couple of huawei , unlock them, convert to stick mode and have a Telstra and Optus SIM. The PI can load balance or deal with failover. Depending where you're in the country Telstra or Optus has better coverage :)
HELP 😟 I would like to use a Pi0W as WAP and small server to allow our phones and tablets to wifi connect (no internet) to documents and video stored on the Pi0. Would this do what I need? And, good stuff here, I'm sub'ed and watching your vids...thanks
Hey mate this is epic, wanting to do a similar project for my ute. Have a look into TMC (Traffic Message Channel) Receivers, I wanted to capture that info along with my gps data.
Host a Tor Hidden Serivce so that you can "dial-in" to the vehicle from anywhere without leaving a conventional port open. Then, using udptunnel, implement WireGuard for VPN access into the vehicle network. Add a USB SSD (like a Samsung T5) to have a place to locally store files - like recorder events, then use R-sync to opportunistically upload them to your home server.
Who do you think this video is helping? If I was familiar with all the information you are running through so fast, I wouldn't need the video anyway. If you want to help someone, slow down and explain what you are doing. If you just want to show off how fast you can go through the information, then keep up the good work.
GREAT tuto Paul! Still relevant 2 years later. The most valuable tuto on the topic! Thank you so much!🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
Just stumbled onto your channel looking for help turning my Pi into a VPN access point. What a treasure trove of information you've created here. Really impressive, thanks!
Hi. Great content. Had a bad detox period after binge watching your Linux and network series. Thanks for your work.
good to see you back
Your AirCard 320u also has two external antenna connectors hidden on its top edge. Recommend you get two suitable patch leads and a dual 4G antenna to optimise 4G reception from your car.
Great video, really appreciate you walking through every step of the config file. Really helps to understand what's happening!
Wow one of the most interesting and useful video I watched in months.
It seems everything gobbles bandwidth and processing time. Adding the VPN probably did this, which is likely the reason for the 2mb drop in performance. I imagine sending video from the dashcams to the home storage, should you do that, would also affect the throughput numbers. But, that is the fact of networking. I like the project!
No, the UDP encapsulation for the packets within the VPN tunnel really add very little. As demonstrated in the video, the performance hit comes from sharing the same RF channel for both uplink and downlink of the Raspberry Pi.
@@TallPaulTech If you added another usb wireless device would that distribute the load better?
@@TradieTrev I could use one in the 2.4GHz band and one in 5GHz, but the fact is that this is enough for the purpose I plan on using it for so I'm not going to bother.
Didn't know you were building a van, but good choice! (hope your van build progresses faster than mine has been!)
On the NM front, you can block devices to stop them being managed by NM, at which point you can resume using AT commands and the like. Not super convenient, but you might be able to use a bash script to knock the modem out of NM when you want to SMS, and then bring it back up afterwards....haven't tried it though, just a thought.
How long do you plan to travel around oz? Where are you planning on going? Sorry, not interested in Tesla. Awesome videos. Keep them coming
Around Australia ... Except WA, TAS, Melbourne Metro, NSW, NT, ACT and SA. Enjoy your ride around the block.
Yeah, well it ain't happening until I get a van and do it all up first. Maybe by then this mass control experiment will be over.
I have been trying to figure out how networking works. It has always been a black box for me. You connected a lot of the dots for me thank you.
Very cool to see what you can piece together with free software and low cost hardware.
Couple of questions:
What OS are you running on your pi zero? If this is going to be powered via the van, are you bothered about the time it will take for the pi to boot up when you first turn the engine on? I had this issue when trying to use the zero to stream music from my home network with OpenVPN - I'd be driving for several minutes before being able to play a song.
Out of curiosity, are you using a Pi for your VPN server at home?
I believe later revisions of the Pi have a more powerful antenna compared to the zero, and you can get get a GSM hat, which might look a bit neater than your USB solution.
Would be interesting to compare the performance with that setup versus what you have shown here.
After all that effort, id be tempted to spend a few bucks more to see if if there are any performance gains to be had.
Just Raspbian or RaspiOS whatever it's called now. It does the job. I also plan it to be on constant power, as it will be a camper van with a full secondary power system.
Your open door looks like a Faraday cage to me. Add some metal shelves in that room and more metal bars/mesh on all windows and no wonder if you have bad reception. I have similar problems with metal shelving in my home lab. They pretty much block most of transmission to and from other parts of the house. Some creative antenna placement needed to solve that.
Great video, great content, well explain. good job! Cannot wait for your VAN build ;)
I can't wait for it either!
Great Video! I'm excited to see your 12v setup in a van. Are you planning on using a raspberry Pi with a touch screen interface to control and monitor all of your batteries and devices? Because that is something i'd love to see.
I am also doing this using a couple of older routers flashed with ddwrt, they setup an openvpn tunnel to my house, that said: i now have a voip connection back to my asterisk server from my car
i am trying to turn my pi into a router with the internet coming from the phone through the usb port and out the eth0 to router as a access point
You throwing in the custom bed you made for the Tesla?
Sounds a great future plan - please keep us informed with your #vanlife
Love your comment on the Pi throughput - I get less than that from the fibre in the house 😢
As for send sms at the same time as internet - never found any device that would let me do it so moved over to using text service from textanywhere and messaging to iOS.
Beard suits you by the way.
what dashcam are you using? or was that a custom project? :)
I already have a model S, so don't really need another one ;) Love the AP setup though. I did this for my oldies in their caravan back in the old days of no 3G...
Hey mate, set the pi Zero AP mode to 802.11N , G is garbage these days. I also recommend setting up wireguard instead of openVPN, in my testing in a similar scenario, it increased my speeds by about 10 megabit
It is 802.11n. G is just referring to the band, in this case 2.4GHz. The terminology of G or A is still used for the band no matter what modulation is going through it.
Also, the config in this video isn't the actual config I'm running ;)
Thanks for your videos and guides. Big fan. Are you ever going to go IPv6 with your setup anytime?
I like to, but the ISPs here just don't offer it. How is it for the rest of the world? Needless to say, my knowledge of IPv6 is rather lacking.
Nice video, I want to do something very similar. What is the model of the Netgear modem you are using? It will save me installing a separate GPS unit.
I really hope this helps me. I am wanting to do something like that on an OLD Raspi (2a) with WAP and am getting nowhere fast.
On another front: Travel safe. All this CV-19 stuff going on. You may get stuck in a state (or territory) for longer than you like or want.
Great project, you would most likely get a couple of bucks promoting a vpn-provider with a setup where the clients are "secure" thru their vpn-service :-D . I have asked on other forums, with not a great deal of luck, are there good ways telling the clients that this network is metered ? For Android I know there is a dhcp option for this, but clients like windows and apple does not use this. By having this, you avoid syncing of dropbox/onedrive , updates etc..
Beastly work you have here
Why not use wireguard instead of OpenVPN. It's faster and copes better with intermittent connections.
for the modem set it to IP Firmware instead of LTE.
This will give you 5 com ports. You can use 1 with a ppp(for data) and then another one you can use for AT commands for sms
also grab some of the big pihole lists that will block windows update, adobe updates, telemetry, etc. This means no background data and should give you if not more MBps but atleast a more stable connection
Thanks for the tip there. I'd like to try it but am also cautious about breaking a working system. When you say IP firmware, do you mean totally different firmware for this modem device?
@@TallPaulTechdepends on the system i was using this modem on over 200 mikrotik routers for portable digital signs. Mikrotik call it IP Mode(as it can talk to the modem via USB to convert to Bridge), huawei call it stick mode. But the cool thing is i had the mikrotik polling the GPS co-ords sending an email/sms and a server at our data center would detect if the GPS co-ords have changed. If so we know someone has stolen the screen and would alert us. We could push new ads/remote access NUC via the ppp modem. If you're looking to travel Aus.. i wold actually purchase a couple of huawei , unlock them, convert to stick mode and have a Telstra and Optus SIM. The PI can load balance or deal with failover. Depending where you're in the country Telstra or Optus has better coverage :)
Awesome content! Keep it coming! Thanks
HELP 😟 I would like to use a Pi0W as WAP and small server to allow our phones and tablets to wifi connect (no internet) to documents and video stored on the Pi0. Would this do what I need? And, good stuff here, I'm sub'ed and watching your vids...thanks
Hey mate this is epic, wanting to do a similar project for my ute. Have a look into TMC (Traffic Message Channel) Receivers, I wanted to capture that info along with my gps data.
10min mark, bit of a Faraday cage you working behind 😁
I wouldn't want to rely on a fly screen for a real Faraday cage! There's just shitty reception in my area
Please consider sending the location of the car back to your house mapping it somehow. Also some sort of remote dashcam security recording.
Host a Tor Hidden Serivce so that you can "dial-in" to the vehicle from anywhere without leaving a conventional port open. Then, using udptunnel, implement WireGuard for VPN access into the vehicle network. Add a USB SSD (like a Samsung T5) to have a place to locally store files - like recorder events, then use R-sync to opportunistically upload them to your home server.
Hi CWNE88. Wouldn't be easier to use this RaspAP it even supports open vpn? Great content!!
I was thinking something similar with openwrt. My guess is he's all about teaching us the fundamentals.
Why not a pi 4 8gig?!??
Why?
Who do you think this video is helping? If I was familiar with all the information you are running through so fast, I wouldn't need the video anyway. If you want to help someone, slow down and explain what you are doing. If you just want to show off how fast you can go through the information, then keep up the good work.
Useless comment, if content is too advanced for you watch another one and come back, or not. Appreciate the time he took to share his knowledge.