Praise for EdgeRouter X
At the beginning of the year my wife and I moved into a small travel trailer. (Camper, RV, coach, whatever you want to call it.) We’re both full time employees, so it goes without saying that this presented us with myriad inconveniences and problems to solve, not the least of which in my case being: consistent, single IP, VPN connection in order to access all of the cloud-based resources I manage in my role.
I already had a software VPN provider, and naively thought they may have a solution. They did not. So, I tried another software VPN provider that did. However, the process of obtaining a static IP, as well as the cost associated, was cumbersome to say the least. At this point, I was struggling daily with the process of updating my IP address across multiple resources in order to connect. Less than ideal.
During a gripe session with my colleague, he offered to spin me up a user account on his router so I could VPN tunnel from his place. I’d been out of the hardware game for awhile, so when he told me he could do this I assumed he’d simply dropped bank on a business class router. However, when he told me he spent less than $100 I was blown away.
He introduced me to the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X.
At a retail price of $59 I was sold. Sadly, the global supply chain has been significantly impacted by COVID-19, and I was unable to locate one of these at retail. I had to pay a bit more to obtain one on the second hand market. Still worth it.
I ordered mine, got it a handful of days later, and then installed it into our primary residence.
This is not a plug-and-play device; however, there’s plenty of write-ups and YouTube videos on how to configure one of these. Personally, I found it to be extremely easy to setup. Enabling and configuring VPN was just as easy. Within a matter of minutes, I had a micro, business-class router installed with a L2TP VPN server up and running. And it’s worked like a charm ever since.
I’m still finding features that amaze me, like the fact that I can connect this device to a DDNS (Dynamic DNS) service so that in the event my home IP address changes, I can still connect to VPN via the hostname. AWESOME!
Highly recommend this device. You can sign up for stock notifications directly from Ubiquiti via the device link above. Not sponsored; not an affiliate link.
