Any way to get around VPN IP address conflict?

VPN
1

My home LAN in Canada has IP addresses of 192.168.1.0/24

I am away from home in the US staying in an Airbnb place with a Wifi network that also uses 192.168.1.0/24. I won’t be able to get these settings changed.

I am trying to VPN into my home LAN, but I am having issues. I have both Wireguard and OpenVPN running, but I am guessing that this is because of the IP address conflict. I am able to route my internet through my VPN, which allows me to watch Canadian only Geoblocked video sites, but I can’t remotely access PCs on my LAN.

Is there any way to get around these IP address conflicts?

2

In the future, you should change your home network’s IP range (at least for the devices that you want to connect by VPN) to something less common. In the meantime, you might be able to work around by setting a route on your computer. For example, in Linux for Wireguard I have been successful with:

route add 192.168.1.10 dev wg0

Or use tun0 instead of wg0 for OpenVPN. But this is hacky and not universally applicable.

3

Go to a cafe with free WiFi, check if they are using the same IP range, if not connect to your VPN, change IP settings of your home network to something not likely to be anyone’s default, reboot everything remotely, then connect to VPN again

4

The only solution to 100% avoid address conflicts in the future is to use unique local IPv6 addresses. (And make sure you use a random prefix otherwise it won’t be unique.)

5

Get a travel router and set it to a different subnet

6

Don’t use 192.168.0.0 or 192.168.1.0 - these are generic addresses and should be avoided in live setups. Sorry to sound the see you next Tuesday here, but, that’s the lesson to be learned.

Set the client to route local traffic via the VPN, so even directly attached networks should be routed via VPN.

edit: “Bypass VPN for local networks” as it’s labelled in Android OpenVPN.

7

The only way would be to change either your home networks IP range or the AirBnB’s ip range

8

If you have VPN’d into your home network from the US, then your machine should no longer care what the local IP range is. If it does, then it’s a split tunnel which can be advantageous sometimes, but also causes problems like this. See if your local VPN client can disable split tunneling.

9

Use IPv6 on your LAN

10

I don’t want to do that as I have over 100 devices on my LAN, many with DHCP reservation. The havoc that could cause could be HUGE! I have a home automation system that controls TV and AVRs via IP addresses, Hue lighting, etc.

I am doing some stuff by using my phone as a Wifi hotspot, but that isn’t ideal.

11

Now that’s a great idea!!! I’ll need to keep that one in mind.

12

Good suggestion! I used to carry a small pocket TP-Link nano-router with me as some hotels used to only allow you one or two devices on their wifi service. And their wifi could be bogged down so having your own private wifi network could be useful.

13

Thanks. I guess this is a good reason to use a less common numbering scheme in your LAN, like 192.168.7.0/24

I have had this issue before.