You might be wondering why you’d even want a travel router. Isn’t it just a home router, but smaller? No. Most of them can do something your actual home router can’t: connect to an existing wifi network or ethernet jack as a client, then spin up their own separate LAN with that connection as the upstream. Your home router doesn’t do that. It expects a cable modem or fiber ONT on its WAN port, not somebody else’s wifi. ...
Your NAS, your Docker containers, your VMs: none of it needs to touch the internet. Ever. That’s the first reason to run a WireGuard tunnel back into your house. Not privacy, just never opening a port publicly in the first place. WireGuard is the one door in, and once you’re through it, everything behaves like you’re on the LAN, because you are. The second reason is the one people actually think of when they hear “VPN”: tunneling home while you’re on somebody else’s network, hotel wifi, a coffee shop, your phone’s hotspot. Commercial VPNs solve that by routing you through their own servers, meaning you trust their business model instead of your own network. Point WireGuard at home instead and your traffic exits from your house. Looks like you’re at home, because you basically are. ...