Raspberry pi as a VPN router with Wake-On-Lan

VPN
1

Hello, I’m planning to build my first home server, but I keep wondering if it would be possible for it to not be online all the time. I’ve read that Wake-on-WAN is not very reliable, and I want to run all my traffic through a VPN anyway, so it doesn’t really fit my use case.

What I’m thinking is that I could use a Raspberry Pi as a middleman between my actual server and the outside world (either through a Cloudflare tunnel or a VPN to a VPS), and use port knocking or something similar to trigger Wake-on-LAN.

Does anyone have experience with this? Any tips on what software I should use? Are there any problems that I should expect with hosting things? (Main use case is Jellyfin + some web apps)

2

u/dragonkiller_CZ, the setup that i have for our home is:

  • VPN setup at the router level (your choice there depending on what you have. Router must be always online for this work)

  • any WOL App of your choise (Android, iOS, etc)

The process to WOL any device in our home is:

  • turn on VPN (ie. connect via VPN that is directly setup at the router level)

then

  • WOL any device in side the home network aka. Pcs, NASes, anything that will work via a WOL packet (as once connected via VPN to the router, then it is as if you were locally connected in the home network already… thus WOL will work with any device that supports it + you are already inside a VPN which comes with all of it’s security benefits)

Once done with the remote work, then those devices can even be shut down remotely (again, via VPN you are as if you were in the local network… so if you can WOL a device, you can sure login to the console of that device and shut it down).

Under such setup, then you won’t need to setup an additional device (aka. R Pi, etc) and you can utilize your existing hardware to accomplish the same result without having additional costs (of having additional hardware just for WOL purpose).

3

Just keep your main server on 24/7 with a remote access, it really won’t draw much power at idle. Have an rpi with something like tailscale on it so in case your main system shuts down for some reason, you can boot it back up, and vice versa (I’m not sure if rpi supporrs WOL)