Once the connection is established, we connect to our OpenVPN Server all the way at home. In the diagram below, our Client first connects to the Cafe Hotspot. Having my own VPN helps me ensure that 1: a spoofed Wifi hotspot or shady hotspot isn’t going to magically get my PII, and 2: since I control my VPN I also don’t have to worry about my web crawling being harvested. This is important because, let’s say I forgot to pay a bill or need to look at some document that contains personal identifiable information (PII).
Well, after connecting to the hotspot and using an OpenVPN client, I can route ALL of my internet traffic through my OpenVPN server at home and it’s entirely encrypted. Let’s say I’m traveling or just working remotely and decide to connect to the “FBI Surveillance VAN 1” hotspot outside of my hotel.
So anyway, it didn’t take me an unreasonable amount of time to determine that I should just buy an Unraid license again. You really can’t beat that deployment time.
That time includes setting up SMB and NFS shares, CentOS and Windows VMs, OpenVPN, and configuring the array and such. It took me about 3 hours (MAYBE) to get the Dell T30 completely setup with Unraid. But, after getting the CentOS 7 webgui working and a container running, I realized just how lazy I have become and stopped. Originally, I considered CentOS 7 for this project and doing all of the leg work to mimic Unraid as closely as possible. While there are other distros that can run off a USB thumb drive, there is just something about Unraid that allows you to go from a basic NAS to a server that can do pretty much everything in a few minutes. We will be using Unraid as our OS because the T30 has limited drive space and it is important for me that the OS can run from a USB thumb drive.