Your company is probably bs you. With how dynamic most people’s IPs are these days the effort of validating every remote employees IP every time it changes would mean massive downtimes and low productivity. They might track the IP and see that you connected from a different address, but that can just as easily occur whenever your ISP decides to renew your IP address which could be anywhere from every 8 hours - never. Do it anyways and if they say something you can claim your home IP changed because your ISP recycles their IP pool. They can’t prove it and they can’t stop it because they dont control your ISP.
Few easy options
Pivpn at home
Glinet brume2 at home
Maybe glinet slate/beryl at vacation house and constant vpn home.
Just get a Raspberry Pi and set up wireguard. Or wg-easy which is wireguard just with a nice and easy UI.
Opnsense with wireguard at home. GL-AXT1800 when traveling. That’s my setup.
Use this guide for setting up a Tailscale VPN server at home.
My Asus router has this functionality. At one point my daughter who was away at uni was connecting through my router at home to evade the password sharing song and dance with Netflix. Even though she lives an hour away now, as far as Netflix was concerned, she was at home.
Where would I look for instructions on this?
I’m in that boat… when traveling I just connect to a travel router to my home ISP using WireGuard. No one cares or notices
This. It sounds like a dumb policy, but then again we don’t know the whole story.
Dumb policy or not, actively circumventing company policy is playing with fire. The OP had better hope they’re more technically savvy than whoever handles IT for the company – and if they need to ask this, they’re presumably not.
they were terrible in my case! the connection kept dropping and the router needed to be restarted every few hours
I bought one. Need more specific info to understand which capability you’re suggesting.
Have you found their relay servers to be faster than Tailscale’s? That might be one reason I switch to ZeroTier.
Yes. Buy a gli net travel router. This is exactly what the routers are for. I have a slate ax that has configured a vpn access to my home. It can be used as a repeater and you connect to any WiFi to it and then you connect to the rourter which has a vpn. It also has a kill switch that if the vpn connection goes down, internet access is blocked.
I was going to suggest the same thing. I WFH using a remote connection and it works just fine. I think the only problem would be if you needed a restart, but even then you can trigger that with gotomypc.
As long as you have someone local that could help with an emergency, it’s gonna be the easier option.
I used to work in a place where computers were not restricted and your user account was admin on the PC, turned on Remote Desktop and RDP’d to my house with my personal PC. Just like “working from home away from home !”
Ha! Did I say my job was at risk?
Good chance it’s a totally different ISP at the mountain home, but OP didn’t specify.
OP, how far away from your regular home is the mountain home? Same state? Same country? Same continent?
Same state, you’ve probably got nothing to worry about. Different state in the same country? Easily trackable…. Might cause problems, depends how strict the policies are. Different country? Definitely going to be problems.
Depending on location and carrier that may be easily disprovable. If your carrier suddenly changes every Friday morning and the max mind geolocation jumps to a different region, that is a very strong indication of abuse.
In any case, is abusing the system really worth possibly losing your workplace and income?
Tailscale better because it’s easier for OP and also because if the local internet connection ever blocks the port, it will default to relay servers instead of just not working at all.
There is not a one size fits all approach. It’s going to greatly depend on your home network setup. Do you have static/dynamic IPs, do you have the necessary equipment, etc.
This article is a good starting point: How to Set Up a VPN Server at Home (4 Methods)