A creative way to enable internet access.

One of our customers used VPN to enable internet access for GarageDoorBuddy Remote. Here’s the setup.

Mounted GDB with zip ties, then plugged it into a digital programmable timer so that it I can make it power cycle every month (or more frequently) if needed. I didn’t use the double sided tape because I wanted to be able to easily remove GDB and take it with me in the future in case I move.

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Connected to my 2.4G band with the instructions from your YouTube video. Thanks for that. I set an IP reservation at the router, as recommended. Everything works as advertised.

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Then, I enabled and configured IPSec VPN on my Cisco router with access rules so that the WAN VPN subnet can communicate with my LAN subnet. As you can see, after establishing a VPN connection over the AT&T network, the iPhone app communicates with the GDB unit perfectly.

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The app successfully pulled the MAC address from the GDB unit over VPN while on AT&T’s network.

And finally, I do not have a static IP address from Comcast which is a problem since I want to reliably VPN to my cable modem’s IP address over the long term.

To solve this problem:

  • I set up a new A record for a domain I own with my registrar, GoDaddy. This A record is intended to always resolve to my modem’s IP address.
  • I created simple a script on the Raspberry Pi to get my external IP address from Google’s nameservers via Debian’s DNS tools.
  • The script tracks any changes to the external IP address.
  • The script updates the A record via GoDaddy RESTful APIs.
  • I set up a cron job to run the script whenever it detects a change in my external IP address.
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