From the other comments, I am not sure if they understood my question; could I just run the VPN on any PC on the network and it works for the whole network, or does the service need to run on the device itself? Because I can’t do anything directly with my ISP managed router and my personally router is too old go support my gaming setup (it doesn’t have WiFi 6 or 5GHz and I do VR).
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
No. Well, you could, but it would be super complicated. You’d need a wired connection from the Switch to your PC and know how to configure a network bridge (kind of like putting a phone into hotspot mode), and your PC would need to be up (not sleeping) for it to work at all. You could do the same with a Raspberry Pi and a WiFi dongle, but again, you’d need to know how to configure it.
It would be much simpler to buy a decent router to put in front of your ISP router, or replace it altogether (you probably can, but I’d need to know more about your ISP to say for sure). I use a Mikrotik router without WiFi and a separate WiFi access point, and the Mikrotik router supports setting up a VPN. They’re not all that expensive (maybe $100), though they can be a bit daunting to configure because they have a million features. Basically, it takes all traffic from connected devices and tunnels it through the VPN, so that computers aren’t aware that it’s connected to a VPN.
Basically, a VPN sends traffic over an encrypted channel somewhere else, kind of like a digital ethermet cable. Most applications aren’t aware of it at all, and the VPN connection is only available on that computer. The only way to share a VPN connection is to connect the device to a machine with the VPN configured and tell that computer to send all traffic from that connection to the VPN.
I hope that makes sense, I’m happy to answer any questions.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 day ago
I actually would know how to bridge the connection between the devices so that would be my choice, as it is the cheapest option.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Awesome, it should work. If the Switch doesn’t allow setting the IP directly (no idea if it does), you may need to configure DHCP on your PC, and how complicated that is depends on what OS you’re running, but it shouldn’t take more than a couple hours to figure out if you’re good at searching for stuff.