Edgerouter lite as travel router?
Trying to get an idea if this is even possible and figured this would be the best place to ask.
I have an edgerouter lite and would like to travel with it to various hotels. I have a digital ocean cloud controller. At home a UniFi USG pro 4, 8 port UniFi switch and a AP Pro HD.
I’d like to have it setup when I arrive at a hotel I plug the edgerouter lite into the rooms Ethernet and than I have lan 1&2 one being a vpn to home and the other being just directly connected to the hotel network. My only concern is the majority of hotels have a captive portal where you have to click I agree or type in some password “supersecrethotelwifipassword”. If I plug it in with Wan1 as dhcp will I need one device to authenticate on the non vpn port and be good to go or can I do something specific with the edgerouter to authenticate. What is the best method for setting the Wan basically.
How would I go about setting up a Lan port on the edge router to connect to my home UniFi system. I really wish I had a USG some days for that simple site to site. I’ve tried to set that up in the past with the edgerouter but I’m thinking it’s not possible? Should I setup a OpenVPN server on the UniFi system then have the edgerouter setup as a client? I would love a guide if anyone has one as I’ve spent many of hours trying to connect the two.
Lastly I saw another post about traveling with UniFi and all they used was an AP. This seems like a really simple idea and maybe I should just scrap the edgerouter and just try and pick up a cheap UniFi AP that can handle like 100mbps as that’s the fastest I imagine I’ll get from hotel speeds. I’ve seen some as cheap at 30-50$ on eBay so wouldn’t be to much to sink in.
Posted Apr 25, 2019, 5:22 AM UTC
Honestly, you're trying to use the wrong tool for the job. There are travel routers, specifically made, and custom-tailored for that role. With interesting features, like one-click vpn, captive portal detection, and other stuff. And you need WiFi, for your own devices, and there are many hotels with only wireless internet. I'm using gl-inet for this, which is a small wifi router with customized openwrt.
Ugh, you are sadly right. I was trying to use what I had at home but that’s not always the best option. I’ll look into the gl-inet and see if it is in my price range. Thank you for the response.