In my situation, my company is cool with me traveling, but for a technical reason, I was blocked from accessing the VPN for one specific thing. This thing let’s me VPN onto a VPN (you can’t do this on your computer directly). With this, I connect the router to a VPN in my home country, then I show up to my company as in my country and can VPN into a VPN.
I found out about the Gl-Inet travel routers and these things are amazing. I bought this one: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-mt3000.
What it does is it’s a travel router you can power with an outlet or USB-C from your laptop, and it has VPN client/server software built in.
You have a few options on what to do:
Get a VPN service
Test a logon with a free account before you pay, b/c VPN server IPs are easily identifiable as a VPN and your company can blanket block the data center.
For big services, you can sign in to your VPN in the router UI and it’ll pull in the configuration and log in. Once you log in on a VPN with the router, everything connected to it is automatically on that VPN connection. When you sign in to your work thing, you show up as in the US.
It has other features that are amazing, so take a look!
Buy two and set one up at home as a server
It’s super easy and built in to the UI. If you buy two of these, you set up the one at home as a server, download the configuration and put it into the one you’re bringing with you. You’ll now have a VPN to your home and you look like you’re at home.
One thing I forgot and just remembered.
Background: There are 2 types of VPN connections, the older OpenVPN standard and the newer, lighter, faster, but maybe slightly less secure Wire Guard standard.
NordVPN has their own implementation of Wire Guard that works fine through their apps, but you can’t use on your router, so you’re stuck with OpenVPN.
However, the device that I linked is pretty fast and, while slower than a Wire Guard connection, isn’t exactly slow.
I just did a test from South America to a US server in the same city on my router and the results were:
NordVPN 144Mbps down - 74 up with open vpn
ProtonVPN 193Mbps down - 137 up with wire guardJust bear this in mind when you’re looking for services. I have Nord b/c I had an old subscription and I don’t think the speed is really a reason to change for most people.