[rikkus]

If you use your own VPN to home then you can access everything on your home network without setting up port forwarding, if you have stuff like that. I used to but not these days.

You could also have the PI run a VPN client and connect to a privacy-promising VPN service, effectively ‘bouncing’ off home.

Not sure if that is even technically possible without pain, or why you wouldn’t connect directly to the privacy-promising VPN.

[joezydeco]

This has some possible use for using streaming devices when traveling abroad.

On a recent trip I tried using IPvanish with a FireTV stick and Amazon detected the VPN, most likely from a blacklisted set of IP addresses.

Using your own home IP should hopefully prevent that from happening.

[mbreese]

Some streaming devices. My IP TV service doesn't work through a VPN back to my home. It acquires location information from GPS (or other location sources), not the IP address. I had wanted to watch something from my home town broadcast channel while visiting family in another state. Turns out that wasn't possible.

[CrazyStat]

I set up a VPN after installing pihole on my rpi, so that I could get the benefits away from home as well.

[Sohcahtoa82]

For port forwarding, I just SSH into my Raspberry Pi and then tunnel through that. Are there any benefits to using a VPN instead, other than not having to configure individual ports to forward? The only one I ever find myself using is VNC.

[henryfjordan]

The only meaningful difference is probably ease. You setup a VPN once but you have to handle SSH every time you want to connect.

Phones all have VPN settings these days, whereas the SSH tunnel would be harder to accomplish.

[rraghur]

Remote troubleshooting machines on your home network.. esp if you have parents/family who aren't tech savvy...

[milankragujevic]

I did this for my parents. I got a RasPi 3 and a 3G modem, and setup remote management so I can check modem parameters remotely, even if the Internet is completely dead (using the 3G modem as an out of band connection).

I setup a VPN client on the 3G interface since there's no public IP address, and I connect to it from my own home network as a local IP address (which can't actually access my network due to explicit firewall rules I setup).

This way I can reboot the modem remotely even if the Internet is dead, and I also setup the Pi to reboot itself every night at 3am, in case something goes wrong and the VPN client crashes.