Im new to VPN’s looking for my first one to try, My question is do VPNs only hide that PC’s ip or any device on my wifi network at home?
A vpn client only encrypts the data for that device and any device ‘downstream’. So on your computer it only affects your computer (unless your computer is functioning as a hotspot for other devices). If the client is running in your router, it encrypts everything getting Internet from that router.
If you run the VPN on a computer the VPN only hides the activity of that computer. If you run a VPN on the router then it hides the activity of all devices on the network.
Thank you for the reply. Can you point me to any that will do it for any device hooked up to my router? I appreciate the help
Checked my router and it has a VPN section in the settings, What would be the next step? thanks for the response!
You need to specifically buy a VPN router for that
I don’t know the specific of your router. You need to configure it as a VPN client (not server). Ideally you want to use OpenVPN so get the OpenVPN configuration file from your VPN provider and figure out how to set it up with your router. Google’s always a friend.
Checked my router and it has a VPN section in the settings, What would be the next step?
Flashing to a firmware that has support doesn’t guarantee that it’ll work, and there’s a good chance that even if it worked at all that it wouldn’t work well, since many routers aren’t powerful enough to perform the encryption involved in OpenVPN (especially when multiple clients are involved).
Well you connect it to the VPN, and then your devices that connect to it should be routed through the VPN. I don’t know your individual router’s settings, but that’s the gist of it.
However, most “VPN routers” are set to make them into a server so other people can connect to it, NOT so it can connect to another VPN. So you might have to download a hacked firmware to install to enable that ability.