{"id":3214,"date":"2015-09-01T22:20:37","date_gmt":"2015-09-02T05:20:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/?p=3214"},"modified":"2017-05-21T16:24:56","modified_gmt":"2017-05-21T23:24:56","slug":"raspberry-pi-openvpn-the-babys-webcam-secure-access-to-your-home-network","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kmwoley.com\/blog\/raspberry-pi-openvpn-the-babys-webcam-secure-access-to-your-home-network\/","title":{"rendered":"Raspberry Pi + OpenVPN + the Baby’s Webcam – Secure Access to your Home Network"},"content":{"rendered":"

M and I have a great webcam setup for our home for the lil nugget – it’s a simple DLink webcam<\/a> that costs less than $50. So much cheaper than an expensive, baby-specific monitor.<\/p>\n

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We use a tablet and our phones to check in on the baby using this great app (tinyCam Monitor Pro)<\/a> – the best feature is that you can turn off your phone and still have the audio alert you to the baby starts making noise louder than the ambient room noise (i.e. squelch the volume &\u00a0not have to listen all the time to\u00a0the white noise we pump into the nugget’s ears to keep him happily asleep).<\/p>\n

The problem is that we can’t view the webcam from outside the house securely. DLink provides an app that lets you view the camera when you’re not on your home WiFi, but it does so in an insecure way – basically broadcasting the video feed for anyone to intercept and see. That creeps me out.<\/p>\n

So we needed a way to get secure access from our phones, anywhere in the world, back into our home network so we could see the camera. Well, need is a strong term… desire, perhaps.<\/p>\n

This is what Virtual Private Networks (VPN) were built for – I’ll walk through how I set one up for our home.<\/p>\n

This is a tech how-to. It’ll take an afternoon or a weekend to complete the project. It was a pain in the butt for me – I’m writing these instructions down in the hopes I can save someone else some time.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Instructions<\/h1>\n

What we’re trying to do.<\/h2>\n

Allow secure access to things inside your home’s network from anywhere in the world.<\/p>\n

Specifically, enabling our Android phones\u00a0and Windows laptops to access our home network, including our baby camera (and file shares and whatever else we want) while we’re not at home. It’s also a great way to provide yourself secure web browsing when you’re away from home.<\/p>\n

These instructions are focused on our Android phones (both running Lollipop), and our Windows 10 laptops. They’ll probably work for your Mac\/iPhone as well.<\/p>\n

These instructions are specific to setting up a Raspberry Pi Linux machine with OpenVPN software, and then connecting to it from the outside world.<\/p>\n

What you’ll need.<\/h2>\n