This guide explains how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a WiFi router, which is one of the best ways to provide internet access to a device that only supports an Ethernet connection. To do this, you need a Raspberry Pi model with Wi-Fi (built-in, Raspberry Pi Zero W, Pi3 or Pi4 or a Wi-Fi dongle) running the most recent Raspberry Pi OS, a power supply for the Raspberry Pi, an external keyboard, and an HDMI or micro HDMI cable.
To configure the Raspberry Pi as a WiFi bridge, follow these steps:
1. Connect the Raspberry Pi to your mobile hotspot.
2. Install OpenWrt Firmware on the Raspberry Pi and configure it to use it as a router acting like a bridge between the Router provided by your ISP and your Computer.
3. Update the system and install software.
4. Configure the WiFi AP Host (hostapd) and configure and commission the network bridge.
5. Troubleshoot the network bridge by checking the network bridge.
A Raspberry Pi can be used as a network router by configuring the wireless adapter as an access point and routing all traffic to the LAN and Internet over the Ethernet cable. It’s possible to add a firewall in the middle to filter what is accessible to Wi-Fi clients.
To create a DIY Z-Wave bridge, you will need a Z-Wave USB adapter.
To create a fully operational Raspberry Pi WiFi Bridge, create an access point (wlan0) and bridge it with the wired connection (eth0). Configure routing between the bridge (br0) and the up-link (eth1).
To share the internet connection through a second wireless router, connect it via ethernet.
📹 my SUPER secure Raspberry Pi Router (wifi VPN travel router)
In this video, I built something I actually used on my family road trip….a Raspberry Pi ROUTER!!!! It is the perfect VPN travel router …
Can I use my Raspberry Pi as a WiFi extender?
A Raspberry Pi WiFi extender is a cheap way to extend your WiFi range. A WiFi extender is different from a WiFi access point. It gets its network connection from a WiFi adapter instead of Ethernet. To complete this tutorial, you will need two WiFi adapters. One must be access point capable.
Can you make a Raspberry Pi a WiFi extender?
You can also use a Raspberry Pi as a Wi-Fi extender. If you know how to use SSH and the Linux command line, this is the most common way to set up dnsmasq and hostapd. This means installing and updating software, managing WLAN settings, modifying configuration files, and making changes permanent. You can do this by copying commands from a tutorial like The Engineering Projects rundown, but you can get into trouble if you try to specify the correct WiFi dongle drivers. Another option is to use software to turn the Raspberry Pi into a wireless router and put that software into repeater mode. This is best for a more capable device than the Raspberry Pi Zero. The RaspAP project creates a router on top of Raspberry Pi OS Lite (it won’t work with the desktop versions). It’s simpler than configuring DNSmasq and hostapd. But you might have to do some tricky work, like setting up routing, so be ready. Speed depends on your network, but even a fast network will slow down over Wi-Fi. Some Raspberry Pi models might slow things down. You’ll probably get better speeds via a repeater than connecting directly to your router. Balena says that the extender can make your connection slower, which might cancel out some of your gains.
How to install OpenWrt on Raspberry Pi?
Download the right image for your Raspberry Pi and OpenWrt branch from Firmware Selector. Flash the image to a micro SD card using a disk imager. Once done, put the SD card in your Raspberry Pi and turn it on. OpenWrt will boot.
Can I turn a Raspberry Pi into a router?
The Raspberry Pi will run a wireless network. It will also connect to the internet through both wireless and Ethernet networks. To make the Raspberry Pi act as a server, we need to set a static IP address for the wireless port. Edit the dhcpcd config file. To edit dhcpcd.conf, use the following command. Add the following lines to the end of the dhcpcd.conf file: To allow traffic to flow from one network to the other in the Raspberry Pi, create a file using the following command:
Can you use a Raspberry Pi as a modem?
Raspberry Pi. A Raspberry Pi is a small, affordable computer. It’s the size of a credit card and comes with its own processor, memory, and WiFi router. People use it for many different projects because it’s versatile. You can use a Raspberry Pi as a router to send network traffic between devices. It can also act as a firewall router to enhance network security. It connects to Wi-Fi and acts as a Raspberry Pi WiFi access point, extending Raspberry Pi networking to provide wireless coverage in homes and offices. With a Raspberry Pi modem, the Raspberry Pi is like a gateway to the internet. Experts often use the Raspberry Pi to build their own routers. They can use advanced operating systems like OpenWrt to improve routing capabilities. The Raspberry Pi is a versatile and affordable tool for exploring and implementing a wide range of network and computing projects. Why use a Raspberry Pi? You might wonder why you should use a Raspberry Pi as a router when you can buy one. There are several reasons to use a Raspberry Pi:
Does a Raspberry Pi have its own IP address?
Any device on a local network gets an IP address. To connect to your Raspberry Pi from another machine using SSH or VNC, you need to know the IP address. If you have a display connected, it’s easy to find the IP address. How to find your IP address. To find your Raspberry Pi’s local IP address, use one of these methods.
Desktop. Hover over the network icon in the system tray and a tooltip will appear. This tooltip shows your network and IP address.
How to make a Raspberry Pi as a wifi bridge?
Boot the Pi and login to the local console. Use raspi-config to change the root password and enable SSH. Connect from my Windows desktop using PUTTY. Paste the bash script, tweaked to reflect our Wi-Fi. Save the script. Exit Nano. Run the script and watch the magic happen. Raspberry Pis are fun. They multiply like rabbits. We started with one to replace a failed Squeezebox, and now we have six or eight. Most are media players running PiCorePlayer. I got a Pi4 to use as a media server, with PiCorePlayer and Logitech Media Server. Another Pi4 runs Home Assistant.
It makes sense to have a spare RPi. I usually have a Pi3 and Pi4 for tinkering. I’ve also tried Dicaffeine. We installed a new TV in our living room. That room had been without a TV for years. It was decided to put a larger TV in a large open wall. The new Vizio M65 fills that void.
Can I run OpenWrt on Raspberry Pi?
Flash the image to a micro SD card using a disk imager. Once done, put the SD card in your Raspberry Pi and turn it on. OpenWrt boots.
Can I use a Raspberry Pi as a wireless access point?
It outputs to Wlan. The client is in the same network. Install host apd first. This software lets us output Wi-Fi via the network card.
Is Raspberry Pi good for OpenWrt?
OpenWrt is flexible and useful for many applications in many setups. The Raspberry Pi 4 still works well on OpenWrt.
Can Raspberry Pi create its own WIFI?
Tip: The ifname wlan0 option at the end of this command tells the hotspot to use the built-in Wi-Fi module, which supports AP mode to broadcast a hotspot network. To host a hotspot from a Raspberry Pi without a built-in Wi-Fi module, use a USB adapter that supports AP mode. After creating the hotspot, it should start working. Connect to the hotspot Wi-Fi network from your computer. Look for a network with the same name as the hotspot. Use the password you set in that step to log in. Run this command to see your current connections: The Hotspot connection is your new hotspot network. The connections above are saved Wi-Fi connections that are inactive.
Can Raspberry Pi connect to 4G?
Yes, but it depends on the modem. There are hundreds of models, some need special drivers, and some only work with Windows. Many devices work well with Linux and the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is just another Linux computer, so your question should be about Linux and USB modems. Yes, but it depends on the modem. As you said, there are many models to choose from. Some need special drivers, and some only work with Windows. But many devices work well with Linux and the Raspberry Pi. It’s hard to find a single guide that’s helpful. I’ll just post this: thefanclub.co.za/how-to/how… and-wvdial. It’s a well-written guide, but it might not be useful for your modem.
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Your resume SUCKS!! (get a website instead): ntck.co/3nUNDGp In this article, I built something I actually used on my family road trip….a Raspberry Pi ROUTER!!!! It is the perfect VPN travel router and it kept me and my family secure while we were on the road. In this article, I walk you through every step to build your very own Raspberry Pi Travel VPN router using NordVPN. ✔✔Links and Guide: ntck.co/3bIdITF 🔥🔥Join the NetworkChuck membership: ntck.co/Premium **Sponsored by Hostinger 0:00 ⏩ Intro 1:07 ⏩ what do you need? 2:25 ⏩ the BIG picture 3:28 ⏩ STEP 1 – Bake the Pi (Install OpenWRT) 4:54 ⏩ STEP 2 – Login to your Pi 4:43 ⏩ STEP 3 – OpenWRT Basic Setup 9:29 ⏩ STEP 4 – Configure OpenWRT Network 14:48 ⏩ STEP 5 – Connect OpenWRT to WiFi 20:02 ⏩ STEP 6 – Setup the USB Wireless Adapter 21:59 ⏩ STEP 7 – Wireless network setup 24:16 ⏩ STEP 8 – VPN Setup (with NordVPN)
This is cool. Thanks for making these. I am learning a lot about network security and the capabilities of Raspberry Pi through your website. Network configuration feels like such a complicated beast to tackle, and if you do something wrong, it could lead to some pretty serious problems, so thank you for this.
Hey Chuck! Great article tutorial, maybe im blind but that long opkg install command is missing from your article description, anyway, here you go folks: opkg install kmod-rt2800-lib kmod-rt2800-usb kmod-rt2x00-lib kmod-rt2x00-usb kmod-usb-core kmod-usb-uhci kmod-usb-ohci kmod-usb2 usbutils openvpn-openssl luci-app-openvpn nano
Other than completed courses, this is the sort of content I’d love to see more of. Pi projects are easy to do, great skill builders and it’s surprising how much you can do with them. I’d love to see more, especially more out of the box stuff. Building our own pocket wifi-router is absolutely perfect and a great skill to have once traveling becomes more viable.
I use open WiFi for my dad’s house but only because he lives on 20 acres in the mountains, far away from the road and other people, and because he’s old an sucks at connecting to WiFi. Love the episode! From one networker to another, I truly enjoy the content you are creating and I love that you are teaching people the most awesome part of IT, networking!
I just got done going through this. All I can say is wow!! Fantastic tutorial and it helped that all my H/W and vpn provider were the same as what you detailed in the article. Amazing collection of open source software all working together. This will be great for our upcoming holidays. My plex will be running on another Raspberry pi via dietpi. Magical!
Dude! I went into this project super doubtful that it would work. I’ve never had a project like this with IT stuff that’s really worked out for me, so I wasn’t really hopeful in myself that it would work, especially given that halfway through the project I came upon changes in the code due to the updated version of openwrt. However, I persisted through, and followed your tutorial to a T, and I am now writing this comment on the wifi setup through my rasppi router! I am super excited to try more stuff like this, so thank you for making such great content ❤️
Chuck, I can’t keep up anymore 🙂 Please can you do a raspberry pi book with all your favourite projects and links to the articles, you’re one of my favourite sources for cisco tutorials and now you’ve engaged with the pi it’s amazing. The enthusiasm and readability of the steps make your tutorials so engaging and easy to watch and follow.
Let me start saying this projects are amazing. I don’t know to congratulate you enough. You have charisma and knowledge enough to pass it in a way that is interesting. Another quick thing, from the content generation stand point it’s endless topics for everybody. Please keep doing this great articles. Thank you!
I slapped one of these together around six months back, works like a charm. I did run into some trouble with configuring my VPN provider in, but that was due to two major technical issues. Coffee and needing to put my fingers on a diet, as I fat fingered my hashed username, running me in circles for 20 minutes before the coffee opened my eyes. 😉
Excellent tutorial Chuck. I configured my “vacation router” a little differently. Rather than use a commercial VPN service, my Dual Wifi enabled Raspberry Pi connects back to an L2TP VPN server running on my home router (Mikrotik). This not only tunnels my families devices safely, it also allows me to access all of my devices at home as if I was still sitting at home. It makes me look like I am still sitting at home accessing the internet as usual. This helps when your online services get a “upset” when you try to log in from a different IP address.
What a website! You’re great to watch even for a 64-year-old retired ex-network manager (that’s 20 years ago now 😁) – don’t you love SNMP???\r We live in Germany and have just got ourselves an RV to go exploring. Your Pi+NAS article was just what the doctor ordered and this router article is the icing on the cake. Only… I’ve been wondering, it would make sense to combine both functions in one box. And I’m thinking of Docker. I’d like to know your opinion, and do you think it would better to install Raspbian, then Docker and run OpenWRT on that? Or to install OpenWRT as the base layer, then Docker and run OpenMediaVault on that?\r A article combining both these thing would make my Christmas (and give me something to do!)\r Keep drinkin’ that coffee, Chuck!
Hey NetworkChuck, curious about a detail – how much storage on a diy router is sufficient to have? In your article this was done with a 32gig sd card. I’m curious what I could factor for the size I give it. Also the enthusiasm I pick up from these articles reminds of a history teacher who was awesome. It’s the way to go because it sure helps when you are challenged by the path. Love this
Just made this with a raspberry pi zero w (original) and works like a charm. keeping this in my camper for travel from spot to spot – getting one device to connect at most campgrounds, this is a game changer and it also VPNs out which is amazing. One question for you or anyone for that matter – if you want to change your location, is there an easy way to load up another config into the openWRT webUI via phone? New to OpenWRT so i’m hoping this can be easier than a re load config via cli and resetting a few steps enabling the conf and uci set steps.
Mr. Chuck liked and subscribed because there isn’t a love button! Im new to this lvl of stuff and the more I watch your articles the more I want to learn. Ive seen several of your articles and the raspberry pi stuff has been super intriguing to me since they are cheap and if I burn one up/crash/melt/or just drop in the confusion/ no worries! I have always wanted to learn linux and I just learned more in one article with you than a month of perusal other articles. Specially since I got a pi and the first thing I wanted to do was this project. See I live in a rural area and you are probably already familiar with connectify/speedify as you are streamer I like to game but my dsl internet is crap so I got speedify and connectify to bond internet connections on my phone and dsl and now a starlink too just playing around with it to see what I could squeeze out of it. The results have been pretty good but I have this inexplicable drive to go further. So I got a pi and Im making my new router for a few reasons. One running those programs on my laptop keeps my laptop tied to the system and my daughter who I also homeschool by the way (great move isn’t it) could be using it instead of her old that has seen better days. The thing is that I need to know if this will allow me to feed internet through the ethernet port because like you I also don’t like wireless networking and really not for gaming. And if not if you have any other articles or advice on how to do that?
Thank you for the tutorial. I am using a GL-MT300N V2 mini portable router. It has openwrt out of the box, a user friendly web interface including VPN support (can store multiple VPN configs and has internet kill switch) and it can be powered from a laptop usb port. 18EUR from china with shipping…. I think this is the perfect travel router, I am using over a year now without any problem. Rasbperry is great for diy projects, but when traveling I want a stable an easy solution.
This was THE MOST informative and interesting Raspberry Pi use I have seen to date. It was amazing to watch, and I WILL be purchasing a “Pi” very soon to duplicate this technique for my use. I do a lot of field service traveling and in hotels all the time. This is exactly what I need, both in those places, as well as in my home. Thank You for your dedication to education for all of us!!
I was looking into buying a vpn router and wasn’t quite satisfied with my search results and I thought I could set it up my self on my raspberry pi. Thanks to this guide of course that got me excited and motivated enough to actually do it. I use Proton VPN and the latest install of OpenWrt which is 21.01 at the time of this writing. I ran into some issues and followed docs directly on the OpenWrt support site and ProtonVPN + some googling of course. There are slightly different turns you need to take when setting up Proton VPN’s openvpn configs so I pointed that below as well. Summary of changes: 1. Wireless Config Deprecated Options: – hwmode is now called ‘band’. – “option disabled” doesn’t get added by default when you plug in the wireless adapter. Although leaving out will actually enable it per OpenWrt doc, but that caused issues of it constantly going down so I just added. It worked like a charm – “option website” seems to work better when you change it from what it’s orginally defaulting to. Did it for both radio0 and radio1 2. Openvpn settings (Proton VPN): – vpn config file and ikev2 username & password are different than your login creds. You can retrieve that from your account settings – You will upload that directly into to OpenWrt and most config will be in place. The only thing I needed to do is add the ikev2 username and password in the GUI box specified in the “edit” section of the openvpn config aread (GUI). Use the first line for the username and second line for the password.
to be honest, for the tasks mentioned (road trip) i use the mikrotik hap ac2 (RBD52G-5HacD2HnD-TC) since it has an IPsec hardware support onboard, the USB port suppoting LTE sticks and it is an accomplished product within appropriate housing and with power supply range 12-30V and regular updates. Anyway, the RPI is also might be useful in many ways, so thanks!
I use a $15- Orange Pi Zero because none of my bought routers would talk to my 4G LTE mobile broadband and I got tired of using an old Windows laptop with ICS to get my Internet. These little SBCs are great. I also loaded HomeAssistant on it and it controls all my home automation. (I live in a caravan) Simply magic. (edit) PS. Thanks for the VPN walk through. Very helpful. Cheers.
Nice tutorial! 2 things that would have been nice to show. 1- Swapping wi-fi to another config to simulate going to another hotel/place 2 – Handling a captive wi-fi setup requiring some form of authentication to get started. A lot of places require this before you get any traffic to flow and it would definitely require temporarily disabling the VPN and perhaps even taking the wi-fi provided DNS offered by the guest DHCP. 3 – A bonus would have been using wireguard as the VPN protocol. Maybe a follow up?
Great article. I built something similar awhile ago. Believe I built it using a pre-built image someone designed. Only addition I had was a switch that I could flip to route through tor if I wanted to just disappear….more or less. Dug out an older pi 3 and going to work through this since I miss my little vpn/tor router. Thanks!
Excellent Tutorial!! I am a newbie (~2 months in) and your articles have made easy the set up of my home network! I wonder if you can combine this set up with wire guard for remote access or is it matter of just port forward your router? BTW, side question: what do you use to power the Pi while traveling?
Hi Chuck, I also did this project following your instructions with an RPi3, I only had one problem with the usb dongle I bought on Amazon and found that it didn’t work as an AP, but in the configuration I reversed the two antennas (RPi3’s built-in antenna as ‘ap’ and USB dongle as ‘sta’) and it works fine! This may help other people who have the same problem as me. Please bring other content and projects using the Raspberry. Thank you
Chuck, you’re amazing, and I go to Disney all the time and WISH I had this setup – for me, the holy grail would be to have a PI set up like this as a remote router, running OpenWrt and Pi-hole (with unbound – as an all-around DNS Solution) on the same device… I’m looking for documentation about how to do this… but YOU certainly do have the flair and competency to make an amazing article on how to make this happen. I hope you trip rocks!!!
One major problem I foresee is — what happens if the public wifi has a login/registration/payment page? I suppose you could temporarily set your computer’s wireless MAC to the same MAC as the Raspberry Pi, login to the public wifi through your computer, change the MAC back to the original, and then boot the Raspberry Pi router and use it.
I’ve been seeing relatively high latency on the built-in pi wifi. It doesn’t matter if it’s OpenWrt or Raspberry Pi OS. ICMP ping shows roughly 0.6-0.7 ms if checking ethernet, but wifi ranges from 3-4ms. If I replace my OpenWRT pi with an OLD OpenWRT router, wifi there becomes 1ms. The pi’s high latency ends up reducing my usable bandwidth over TCP due to window sizing/acknowledgements on appliances where I can’t tune window sizes. Are you seeing similar latencies with the onboard wifi vs USB, or what else should I look at to debug my local latencies?
I believe at step 5 when you are making changes to radio0 you are changing the hwmode from AC wifi to b/g/n wifi, hence why there is a need to change the website to 7 as well as changing the htmode (VHT80 = 80MHz – usually for 5GHz wifi). From my own experiences openWRT doesn’t like radio0 using 5GHz 80MHz on a PI 3B+/4B (might be fixed on the 4B at this time of writing though). You may also find that the Internet speeds when connected to the wifi network (that is also connected to NordVPN via OpenVPN) aren’t the best. I believe you can make these changes by the GUI to radio0 directly as even one typo when doing config by CLI can cause your Pi to become inaccessible in some cases. I’ve actually figured out how to do this on Pi OS 64-bit since I wanted to be able to use AC wifi on both network interfaces (access point and wifi client), non kernel supported USB wifi adapters, Wireguard connection to PIA VPN and a python app using flask to host a web page that can be used to connect to other wireless networks using a browser. It sounds like a lot but honestly it’s quite easy to set up and can be configured in different ways.
A really useful and well presented article. Thank you. I’ve been looking for something like this. I have a Pi 3b that I want to use it in exactly the same way as you have with the same configuration but without the vpn. What I want to do is restrict certain devices that connect to the wifi hotspot at certain times – the kids phones. Coming from a pfsense background I know how to do it via the firewall rules. Can the same be done with openwrt on the Pi?
Hi Network Chuck, wow two years ago, but still relevant. I’ve started traveling again and get frustrated by the devices available out there as well as suppliers’ WiFi access, so need a good solution. The VPN tunneling will help with my regional streaming services, fantastic! One of the biggest issues I’ve found is the use of captive portals at hotels etc, they can be a pain, constantly being timed out and re-registering to some, I think a regular scheduled ping can resolve this. But it’s logging in with the router, there is no login page on the router itself, so I’m wondering if I should log in using my phone or laptop and then clone my MAC address on the router? What do you think?
It looks more like a fancy extender….love the vids i think i used to watch chuck while he had about 35K subs.it’s amazing how the website grow so much…. I want you to try Ethiopian coffee. I think you have it in your coffee site but i want you to try it like how they make it. You love coffee soo much so i think you have to cause it’s the birth place for coffee.
Does this cover connecting to open networks, which need yout to accept the network rules and / or login before being able to use the network? Since the DNS is changed to cloudflare / google, neither the WRT router or the clients get the authorizeation site displayed … if not this is only usable for classical WiFis without additional authorization.
in your Openwrt config you forced 802.11g as the default connection and HT20 means you’re forcing a 20mhz spectrum, using website 7, while disabling shortguard for 40mhz spectrum. After the setup is done, I’d try and use 802.11n on there instead by switching the 11g to 11n. HT20 will work but it won’t be as fast as it can go but it won’t run into as many issues since it narrows the band to 20mhz. Short_gi 40 0 means you’re disabling the short guard for 40mhz but it might be better to change that to short_gi 20 1 to improve throughtput speeds. If you’re in an area with little to no wifi networks, then ht40 should work fine with short_gi 40 1.
Hey CHUCK!!! I tried first with one of my Raspberry Pi 3b+’s without much luck – so finally decided to use a spare 4b which I hated to use because they are hard to get these days. To cut to the chase, I got the router working very well, so then I bought NordVPN today and followed your instructions to get it configured, and then verified all working on openWRT checking for the VPN IP address. I will be taking it to Puerto Rico next week for the big checkout to see if all my stuff works, especially YT TV, which actually thinks PR is not part of the US. So I will edit this post when I get back to let you know how it works for me. This is my 4th or 5th project you have helped me with (love the NAS with my PLEX addon and and TV dual tuner – I have a 4B set up with 10 TB RAID drives – 5 TB total), and next will be some hosting on one. By the way, I am a 78 year old and this stuff is my hobby now and a lot more fun than golf or perusal pro sports – my friends use me for their free help desk, so that is pretty fun as well. Thanks Chuck – I feel like I know you :person-turqouise-waving:
I am curious how the speeds compare to your main network? I was interested in doing something like this as my room has almost no wifi connections so I was going to use a router to connect via WDS allowing me to get wifi in my room and use the ethernet ports. Are the speeds similar to the normal router or are they drastically lower?
Thanks for these project articles! I created a cool wireless system in my RV with wireless WAN for public Wifi – on a Protectli box and your PfSense vid. Using OpenWRT to do this is a great option also for travel routers and I may try it out… ORRRR even combine a version of this Pi wWAN with a wired PfSense box (for FW) and an old DDWRT router for family to connect to internally.
Use case; in home wifi adapter for home automation (my current router is not supported by automation electrical outlet plugs) Question; could I just use an ethernet cable to provide internet access and the internal wifi as access point instead of needing to buy the adapter or would I still need an adapter?
Question for Chuck and friends: I have my first Pi – very exciting. Do you all normally re-flash the SD every time you want to try something different? Or do you buy a handful of SD cards to swap out? Also, can you partition a larger card into different Pi flavors and multi-boot? One final question — for now: What about getting a larger card and using Docker for the various Pi flavors? Just typing that and I thought of many more questions but I will spare you for now. Thanks!
I tried this on my RaspberryPi CM4 (compute module), with two USB dongle. I had some issues. I first had to install an additional package: opkg install kmod-usb-dwc2 Then for lsusb to work, I had to insert the following line inside /boot/config.txt : dtoverlay=dwc2,dr_mode=host.\r Finally, I don’t know if it’s because I had two adapter, a newer version of openwrt or because the driver ignition is too slow, but I had to add to /etc/rc.local the following lines before the exit 0 sleep 10 /sbin/wifi up\r After this, everything worked as expected. Great guide thank you!
I finally got around to doing this project, followed every step and they are still relevant. I did in on a RaspberryPi 3 B with the same Wifi adapter but it is slow at only 2mbps – 5mbps download, even though i seen upload go as high as 20Mbps on a 100Mbps connection. with the Pi 4 its is much faster at 40mbps up and down. Also you say at several points in the article that you will list the commands in the article description but i dont see them anywhere and the links didn’t lead to them neither 🙁
You could also take it to the next step, set up a VLAN in your home that only has access to the internet and not to your local network (securing your home network away from VPN just in case of a breach), and configure a VPN host on that network that you can connect to using this OpenVPN client. Then you don’t need to have any VPN subscription if you already trust your home ISP and are just trying to get out of being monitored on public networks. Would recommend using a spare PC (can get from an electronics recycling depot, or use a second Pi) with pfSense installed and two network interfaces to be able to facilitate this on the cheap without needing fancy routing equipment at home. You may need to get a Dynamic DNS registration though.
Hey NetworkChuck great articles first of all.. Could you do this on a Pi3b+ (sitting around) and use this setup, would this be viable for a secure portal from home network to internet provider. Would it be possible to docker it like your KEMP Load Balancer article as well? Thought of it from perusal the two of articles. Would it be too slow? .. thanks
About to go on vacation in 4 day’s working full time & working on this & a nas after work. I’m soo close to having everything done before my vacation. As a 40 year old welder who has been messing around with Linux for the first time building a router & a nas. Now I’m ready to trade in my windows laptop for a Linux one. Having fun & learning so much. I just found out what a IDE was I need a good not over complicated one. Also GitHub is awesome. Whole other world out there.
This article was very interesting for me and my current thought project. In theory if someone were looking to use the wired connection on the pi in their home and create a wifi access point to (theoretically) circumvent geolocation how difficult do you believe it would be to only allow wifi traffic if the vpn connection is active? So my scenario would be: bedroom xbox connected to raspberry pi ap, and raspberry pi is connected via vpn (Nord VPN) to another country. But I don’t want any traffic moving over the ethernet connection for the devices if the Nord VPN connection is not up. I guess my main personal concern is how do I block wifi traffic to the internet if the VPN connection is down?
I‘ve been using old / out of service routers: flashed firmware to Open WRT and configured them into a „bridge mode” (define a provider‘s WWAN as a DHCP hook-on and the WiFi/LAN as a DHCP server). This way I can get similar internet access. Haven’t tried travelling with it but the principle seems the same. So not sure if it even needs a PI. We all have some old routers somewhere at home, don’t we?
This went great and I learned a lot, thanks! One question. What changes do I need to make to add a VPN “kill switch” so that if the VPN goes down all traffic to and from the router locks down? As it stands, if the VPN goes down, the router will silently router the traffic openly, which I do not want. I’ve been doing some research and it looks like it might have something to do with zones and the firewall, but I’m a little lost. Thanks again for a fun and highly useful tutorial!
72 usd for a raspberry pi 4 1gb here minus everything else, over kill for building a router tbh, can get any supported router by openwrt, ddwrt, fresh tomato etc and do all that but i gotta admit the experience was pleasing to watch and the fact that one can do so much with a raspberry pi is amazing add the knowledge of networking and skills, i enjoyed perusal this article… good stuff.
Thank you Chuck. I am working out the last semester for my undergrad and plan to make a mobile wifi router for my senior individual project and this article is great. I plan to 1st follow your example to the letter and then redo from scratch with a few changes if I can manage them through the basic concepts. I am hoping it is safe to assume that the reason fro using OpenWRT vs Raspian is the added features for the web UI you use. My goal is to achieve similar results using raspian and ufw possibly. Thanks again.
Hey Chuck, awesome article! What kind of speeds are you seeing connecting to a wireless host? When I connect my desktop to my home network, I see 700+Mbps but, when connecting through OpenWRT on my pi 3B my speed drops to an abysmal 10Mbps (All wifi). I’ll be doing a test today with the pi hardwired to my home router. Do you have any advice?
Chuck, I ‘liked’ the article, but for me there is something missing. Most hotels/coffee shops/trains now have a banner login page where they expect you to enter an eMail address to get connected. This won’t help in that situation… will it? Or when you connect a WiFi client does that get paased through?
I’d think it would be better to do the wifi interfaces opposite…. USB wifi with the antenna connect to public wifi .. because you will be more distant from the public wifi access point, so the external antenna will ensure a better more reliable connection. Since you’re going to be very close to your pi, use it’s internal wifi to provide wifi to all your nearby devices… Being in close proximity, they will do just fine off the built in pcb based antenna.
Awesome vid. How do you do this in reverse? I have a UISP airMAX NanoStation which is a LAN (incl power) high gain antenna to be used with routers. But those router don’t work with access points that use MAC filtering because they can’t logon as device. So I’m hoping to logon the Pi with it’s IP and MAC to a pubic AP and then pass this connection on to other devices through the Pi’s wifi card.
Hey Chuck, love the website. When I saw this vid, I knew I HAD to complete this project. I followed your instructions to the T but it doesn’t work. Firstly, I noticed the second command in your file was incorrect: “opkginstall luci-app-openvpn” should have a space between opkg and install. Secondly, when I carry out the commands at #Provide VPN instance management, I receive errors “uci: Entry not found”. I am unable to setup the VPN component of the tutorial. How can I get it working?
Hey Chuck thanks for this article. I have seen a few people doing RPi tutorials for making a travel router but they all stop at the setup point. Practically there are several limitations when using this on the road. Could you cover actually connecting to public WiFi through the RPi router? While standard wifi access with terminal commands isn’t super hard doing so headless is less intuitive. What do you do with those networks that require you to connect and then put some token in on a webform in order to actually access the internet? VNC? I am often on the road with a group and being able to connect one device to public WiFi and then hotspot it to everyone else would be great but is often done someplace where I only want to use my phone or tablet and not drag out my laptop for a full ssh/terminal/VNC connection. Could you please cover solves for this with the travel router setup?
Great article . Can this be used to create static ip address for example if i travel to Sweden and want to SSO to my US job, to make it look like i never left US and have static NyC ip coming from this travel router even if i connect to Swedish network locally . If not do you know what device can convert that ?
Ok, figured I would ask before I mess around… Currently I have an rpi with wireguard set up to VPN to my home network. If I set up another pi at home to use as a VPN router, I could vpn to my home network which would be secured by another VPN service via the pirouter…right? Then, no need to bring a router with you anywhere.
Really enjoy the articles. I installed and re-installed Openwrt on a Pi-4 so many times that I could almost do it without notes. Finally found out that the USB dongle was the problem. Ordered the right one and now I have a great travel router. Only one problem now. I have a subscription to NordVPN and installed it using the instructions. The web interface shows the OpenVPN instance enabled and started, but I my clients still show the IP address of the home router and not of the VPN instance. I even got creative and started playing with the Luci interface and created new instances to different countries that seem to connect but I the client, which shows that it is connected to the travel router still has the IP of the home router. What am I missing?
I know this is a bit old, but I’ve just found it and am in the process of getting my R-Pi 4b up and running as a router but I’ve come unstuck because the WiFi adapter Chuck is using isn’t listed in his notes – in fact nothing is. All the instructions have now been deleted and info on his courses inserted Can anyone point me in the direction of which WiFi adapter he’s using?
I finally got this working, I found a good usb wifi and made that the connection to the network and use built in for my devices to connect. not great speed wirelessly around 85-100mbps not sure if built in radio is the speed killer or not.. My question is how good is NordVPN? Do all other vpns like ghost provide this downloadable config file?
On the one hand, not bad, on the other hand, routers r sold separately, not because it is a rudiment. The structure of the raspberry pi has not been specially optimized for handling internet traffic, it would be good to compare performance between it and router with similar hardware. And u can’t connect more than one device over a wire without a switch or another network card P.S. Sorry 4 my english
I would love a article like this one on how to do a OpenVPN to your home network to get around “websites that require your home IP” and access local home servers like a plex server. Would be even better if you include mac address filtering on the new network so that one MAC say of the TV goes over the OpenVPN whereas the MAC of the phone or laptop goes out over normal internet.
If I could run his articles at half speed, I would understand better…lol. Love the articles, but man does he talk fast!!! I’m getting ready to make one of these. Question, though. I made the NAS that he showed. Would it be possible to just switch out the SD card, pop on the wifi, and use the same hardware?
Super noob here, can this setup work if I were to take my office laptop from Canada to US and still look like I am on my home network. Keep in mind I work for finance so there are strict restrictions around leaving the province and we’re not allowed to install anything. Is there a way I can make this work?
Wow, I didn’t know I could run OpenWRT on a raspberry pi (or anything), I thought it only run on those Linksys WRT routers (thus the name). I will be playing with it to see what it can offer. I followed Chuck to create a wired-to-VPN-wireless router, and it worked. Some steps can be done with the GUI of OpenWRT, no need for all those command line commands, but it was fine.
Hi Im a noob. is there a way to run the internet through the ethernet port instead of the onboard wireless? i want to use this project to run OpenWrt and VPN through the Raspberry Pi and hard lined to the router provided by my ISP, because the router has not feature to set up Surfshark or any other VPN provider. Any help would be grateful thanks
I’m new to this kind of stuff, so forgive me if this should be an obvious answer. Would this work for a dual option, Wi-Fi or wired connection to a WAN? I.e., I either connect the Pi to a router or switch port via Cat5 in a vacation home and broadcast my secure Wi-Fi SSID or connect it via Wi-Fi and broadcast my secure SSID?
Am I missing something or what’s the benefit of this in comparison to ordinary travel routers like GL inet and others? I can’t see the issue with open hotel WiFis which have a captive portal solved. To pass the captive portal you have to connect the router to the regarding network with VPN off so you can access and pass the captive portal with one of its clients, right? After this the internet connection should be established and you can turn on the VPN killswitch to tunnel all your data thru the VPN. The only issue I see (and this is the same for the mentioned GL inet routers) is that you might leak your client data from the moment you passed the captive portal, which then enables internet access for all your clients, and the moment you enable the VPN tunnel and killswitch. Correct me if I’m wrong and tell me how this is actively avoided if it is. Thanks.
Oops my dear!\r How is everything? I hope so.\r I really enjoy following your website.\r \r I don’t have a lot of resources, as corporate hardware is kind of expensive. I needed a solution to simulate a switch with 802.1x.\r I want to test with Microsoft’s NPS. Do you have any suggestions that would be viable virtually? I searched a lot and didn’t find anything. I would have to buy a switch, but when I saw the prices, I got scared.\r \r Thank you!
Brother, I have a question for you. I want to create a Raspberry Pi5 cluster as a central server for my company that works in the field of website design and artificial intelligence. But I don’t know if this cluster with two A500 graphics cards and one RTX 5090 graphics card that will be released in the next two years can do machine learning work in my company or should I get a normal computer for this? please advise me
Could this be used to setup a VPN secured wired AP to go between my modem and a WIFI mesh network? I need to upgrade my home network to a wifi mesh, but from the research I’ve done thus far it doesn’t look like mesh wifi setups play nicely with VPNs. This device only has 1 RJ45, and I would need an in and and out. Does this make sense? Is there a simpler way to have a VPN secured box upstream of a mesh WIFI network?
Great tutorial. Worked a treat. 2 comments. 1, when you do the bit where you install a bunch of things, your image over writes the list of things to install (and I could not find the page where you say the commands are shown) I managed to work out what was “missing”. opkg install kmod-rt2800-lib kmod-rt2800-usb kmod-rt2x00-lib kmod-rt2x00-usb kmod-usb-uhci kmod-usb-core kmod-usb-ohci kmod-usb2 usbutils openvpn-openssl luci-app-openvpn nano 2, is there a way that I can connect to a captive portal? BT hotspots (and others) send you to a webpage to log in. But I could not see any way of dong that. Looking at ways round this.
I ran into the same problem wherein the files were no longer listed. HOWEVER, I was able to list them by reading them off the screen while pausing. Here is the command with all the files. As of 12/09/22, they still worked. Just copy and paste them onto the command line and hit ENTER: opkg install kmod-rt2800-lib kmod-rt2800-usb kmod-rt2x00-lib kmod-rt2x00-usb kmod-usb-core kmod-usb-uhci kmod-usb-ohci kmod-usb2 usbutils openvpn-openssl luci-app-openvpn nano
hi chuck, i have a broken raspberry pi B, the client insert a POE on the Ethernet port resulting to broken USB and Ethernet port. i only have builtin wifi to connect to the network. What could be the best thing that could do this Raspberry pi into a Router? i only have single Wifi Interface. thanks buddy!
Chuck huge question man. I have a pile of old Killer 2100 Ethernet Cards Do you know of anyway to use those to make a Linux router The cards run Linux themselves But Linux doesn’t seem to notice them Any of them I have every single sku Killer M1 PCI, Killer Xeon Pro pcie x1, and Killer 2100 pcie x1 The integrated Killer 2200 NIC on my AMD FX Ubuntu Workstation works
I was able to follow the instructions and make a few mods so that I only have a Lan and a Wan interface. I may turn back on the wifi to be able to configure items from my standard network… So to do this I stole my Octopi rasp 4 B… when I went to order a replacement, there were none. I guess the Octopi will live on a Thinkcenter Tiny 🙂 Also I choose to use NordVPN’s dns and fully tested for any dns leaks…. All looks good and secure. Using the built in ether port and an additional USB3 ether port, seeing speeds of 90 Mbits/sec…. Getting great 4K streaming through the vpn… Fastest I ever saw with my ASUS 86 was 28. Thanks for the great article.
I would like to push the boundaries of raspberry pi.. Would like to learn how to animate pi install programs I normally use in Linux.. Ubuntu and Kali.. Like Neofetch gnu radio,.. Would like to be able to format a 1tb SD card to run pi in card slot.. Examples of Auto scripts for pi would would be nice as well..
How does this work for a true hot spot where you connect to the wifi hot spot and a webpage is supposed to open up asking you to accept the terms, put in an email, or like most hotels; enter a password on the webpage in order for the hot spot to allow your MAC address access to the network public internet.
Ok I have a question for you can u make this router and add a 5g modem and add say 4 lan Ports I drive truck and use a 4g hotspot with lan ports for my gaming pc Apple TV and my logbook device but when I stay at a hotel I can’t bring my Apple TV to the hotel Cause it doesn’t have a Webbrowser would be nice to have an all in one device the lan ports aren’t the most important thing cause I can just add a router in the truck to add the lan ports but I have learned to ask for everything and see what can be done
Don’t get HACKED!! Protect yourself with Bitdefender: bit.ly/bdnetworkchuck (try Bitdefender for FREE for 120 days)\r \r \r 🔎🔎Project walkthrough and Links: ntck.co/282\r \r \r (affiliate links below) \r \r \r WHAT YOU NEED\r —————————————————\r Raspberry Pi 4 Kit: geni.us/BmCeEgp\r External USB Hard Drive: geni.us/zAMSS\r **optional — EXTREMELY nerdy Geekwork NAS case:\r -Case: geni.us/YfACT1\r -Cooling Expansion Board: geni.us/sqU6EW\r -SATA expansion board: geni.us/9RQAaM\r -Power Adapter: geni.us/LTLOHJ\r -Internal SSD: geni.us/Gdahek9\r \r \r \r \r 🔥🔥Join the NetworkChuck membership: ntck.co/Premium 0:00 ⏩ Intro\r 1:05 ⏩ what do you need?\r 2:25 ⏩ prep the Raspberry Pi\r 3:05 ⏩ setup HACK – Raspberry Pi Imager\r 4:13 ⏩ access your Raspberry Pi via SSH\r 5:02 ⏩ Update your Raspberry Pi OS\r 5:38 ⏩ Install OpenMediaVault (NAS software)\r 9:02 ⏩ Basic Config – OpenMediaVault\r 9:33 ⏩ Add a USB Hard Drive – OpenMediaVault\r 10:32 ⏩ Create a shared folder – OpenMediaVault\r 11:58 ⏩ Configuring NFS and SMB shares – OpenMediaVault\r 12:39 ⏩ Enabling NFS or SMB \r 13:31 ⏩ NFS Troubleshooting – OpenMediaVault\r 15:39 ⏩ Access your NAS via Windows (Network Share)\r 17:42 ⏩ Install Plex Media Server
I stumbled upon this article while searching for ways to build my own personal NAS. The step-by-step instructions in this article were easy to follow, and the end result was nothing short of amazing! I couldn’t believe that I was able to build my very own Raspberry Pi NAS with just a few simple components. It’s truly a game changer for anyone looking to store and access files remotely. Thank you so much for sharing this article, it’s AWESOME!.
Love it and i will try it. I’ve always wondered how to do this and perusal other people’s articles explaining things gets boring quick but yours make me feel excited to learn more stuff. Also I have already done a headless installation of the raspberry pi following your article. Thank you for everything.
Chuck THANK YOU for making this article!! Ive been needing to build a NAS for a while now and this is a perfect and affordable solution. I really appreciate the amazing article, you are a great content creator and really help so many of us out especially those of us who are newer to the IT field. Keep doin what youre doin man!
Excellent tutorial! Works perfectly. I was able to take a “brand new” (it’s been in the box in a storage bin for a few years) Raspberry Pi B+, a Thermaltake BlacX Duet docking station, and two old Seagate hard drives (3TB each previously used in a now dead Synology NAS) and turn them into a new Raspberry Pi NAS. Amazingly, it’s screaming fast even when moving 4GB article files wirelessly. This will seem counterintuitive but literally the “best” thing about this tutorial was perusal Chuck actually show that he had an error during the initial provisioning. I ran into the same issue and was able to resolve it using Chuck’s instructions. For anyone reading this, I’d suggest letting the Pi/Open Media Vault wipe and reformat the hard drives prior to mounting the shares (wiping and reformatting via MacOS Disk Utility didn’t work for this application…..yes, Disk Utility wiped and reformatted the drives but Open Media Vault did it in the way it wanted that worked). Next up….Raspberry Pi Super Computer: youtube.com/watch?v=X9fSMGkjtug Thanks @NetworkChuck
Using this article as a foundational baseline, I just completed setting up my Raspberry Pi 4 NAS using 4 x 8TB external 3.5″ HDDs. I used OpenMediaVault (obviously) along with the MergerFS & SnapRaid plug-ins to achieve the RAID component. After all said and done, a little over 21TB of usable storage space on my new NAS. Thanks for a great and inspirational tutorial! The steps provided were perfect!
Dear Mr. Chuck, Your website is just too useful for our modern world. I’m a Linux Sysadmin and Network Administrator as well but never bothered to build an online presence or even do the social media thing… I valued my privacy and also the amount of work the socials meant was a mindful for me… I thank you deeply for the work put into these articles that helps from beginners to advanced users. I appreciate it. You’re making a lot of people benefit from all over the world 🌎. Cheers!
Hey there, Chuck! It’s so nice to have a creator like you make content like this. Pretty, pretty awesome, man! Liked the article and subscribed to your website. Anyway, what open-source software do you recommend to use for syncing files between this Raspberry Pi NAS and a regular more powerful NAS? Cheers
Note: anyone currently following this how to article may have noticed that OMV has changed some of their interface and how to do things. Just wanted to say during the part where you add a shared folder, you need to apply changes after setting up your attached HDD then you can select the HDD when setting up the shared folder. Otherwise your attached HDD doesn’t show up as an option to chose from.
Good call for enabling SSH while writing the micro SD! 👍 And good advice about the use of NFS. However, I have been using an Odroid HC2 for my NAS, as much as I love the Raspberry Pi it’s not great for NAS due to the use of the shared USB website. The Odroid HC2 is built just to work as NAS, and the SATA connector is native and gets maximum bandwidth. It’s also very neat and compact. Thanks again for the article, I may give Plex another try, cheers
Great tutorial, currently have 2 Pi3, so gonna grab a Pi4 and get with this, I currently have WD mycloud, but I’m limited due to the software. Gonna have to scan through you older articles now as I noticed you had a pi stack in the background and very interested as to what you have running, Keep up the great work and keep drinking that coffee 🙂