Maybe this is a silly question and I just misunderstood the VPN service that NordVPN provides.
In addition to the privacy features of the VPN I wanted to be able to connect to my home NAS from whenever I am in the world. I hoped that if I put both my laptop and NAS on the VPN it will solve my issue.
Currently testing ssh connection between two laptops on connected to the VPN and they just don’t see each other. When connecting to VPN both where given new same ip address 10.5.0.2…
Is it possible to reach other devices connected to the NordVPN?
Hopefully not possible with all devices being isolated. This isn’t Nord’s purpose. If thats what you wanna do, install OpenVPN or similar on some Raspberry Pi, run that at home, and connect to that.
Port forwarding is unrelated, it seems OP wants to stay inside the VPN, not open his services to the internet from behind it.
That’s unfortunate. I thought VPN was all about creating a secure (virtual) private network.
I thought that if NordVPN is based on OpenVPN / WireGuard it would give me this functionality out of the box. I definitely need to make more research on this then.
Seems TailScale or ZeroTier could do what I want.
VPN does, indeed, means “Virtual Private Network”, but most (all?) commercial “VPN” services intention is to redirect all your internet traffic through their VPN server IP in order to hide yours/unlock geo restricted services/etc. Those services do, indeed, use VPN protocols, but has never been intended to provide local communications.
I thought VPN was all about creating a secure (virtual) private network
It is, but it’s a point-to-point connection between you and their vpn server, not between you and your own device(s)
Thanks for explanation. That explains my gut feeling that indeed main offering of commercial VPN providers is privacy and not my use case.