What is the use of VPN Server and VPN Client in my router?

What is the use of VPN Server and VPN Client in my router ?

VPN server is a service running on your router so you can connect to your home network when you’re outside with a client VPN.

VPN client is a service so you can connect your router to a Server VPN in the public network, this way your traffic goes trough the VPN tunnel without having to install a VPN client on your laptop or PC.

Its worth noting that a VPN server hosted on a spare PC/Raspberry Pi or whatever will be infinitely better than using this

One of: remotly access home from anywhere.

Server means you can connect to it as the vpn provider. Mean sing you can rout traffic from elsewhere through the router there. The vpn client is you routing all the traffic from that router through somewhere else.

Looks just like my ui. I love this feature. Great for traveling and on public wifi

Gotcha, succinct AF.

With the client, I use a secondary router to travel, then use its vpn client to connect back home to my server, so that I can keep the same SSID and not have to worry about what I might be sharing

VPN server is a service running on your router so you can connect to your home network when you’re outside with a client VPN.

This seems interesting, is there any detailed guide for setting it up?

Or it can be used as a point-to-point link with another router and provide encrypted access to another network.

The problem with most consumer router VPN’s is that they use the CPU rather than ASICs to provide the encryption/decryption power. This means that they are slow. I guess slow is relative – if you have a 100Mbs connecton then may you won’t notice. If you have 1Gbs Internet, don’t expect to get close to this on your VPN connection.

There are really better mechanisms at this point rather than using this functionality in a home network. Examples would depend upon your use case.

Better, how? Do you mean in terms of speed/throughput?

The almighty Google knows.

TP Link VPN Setup

There is probably a documentation from tp-link or video on youtube.

I use OpenVPN Server on my TPLink router. It’s very helpful for remote access to some of the VMs I run on my home server. I also can access my NAS, but the file transfer rate is pretty slow.

you literally just checkmark the box that says enable.

then download the config file and copy and paste it to the client machine

then download the openvps app and import the config file

Possibly both depending on your service and the power of the router, however my main concern is security. Built in things like that on consumer/prosumer hardware is notoriously out of date and also often not tuned very well at all

You could use something like pivpn or wg-easy and get a much better experience

I agree, assuming it’s running stock OEM firmware. I run open source firmware instead. It’s updated much more often than the stock is, and often more thoroughly.

I’ve set one of these up for work (ER8411) and the OpenVPN firmware is very much out of date, certain protocols aren’t even supported.

It might as well just not even be there, but I definitely wouldn’t use it.