Simple Route Needed for Typical home setup

I’ve been just searching through a mind numbing amount of advanced routing posts trying to find the most basic route for my need.

I want to set a route so that everything on the ZeroTier network (192.168.149.x) that is trying to access my home network (192.168.1.x) will find it’s way.

My home default gateway is the super obvious one: 192.168.1.1

Can someone tell me what to specify?

The way that I have this setup is:

192.168.1.0/24 via 192.168.149.xxx
192.168.149.0/24 via (LAN)

Where 192.168.149.xxx is the ip of the bridge on the zerotier network. To get (LAN) I think you don’t enter anything in the via place. I remember also looking for a long time how to get this setup to work.

It’s been a while since I set this up, but I think routing 192.168.1.0/24 via 192.168.1.1 isn’t correct since zerotier doesn’t know about that network and therefore you can’t route directly to the gateway. I think you just route to the bridge, and then since the bridge is on the 192.168.1.0\24 network it’s able to pass the packets along correctly.

In my setup, the bridge is actually the router, so I’m not 100% sure this works for a non gateway bridge. But I think it should.

here recommends using \23 for the first route so that it’s de-prioritized when both machines are on your home network

Thanks. Can you simplify? What do i type. I don’t think i can type “.xxx” can i? Not sure where to get the bridge ip? Do you mean the default gateway of ZeroTier (which is 25.255.255.254 currenty.)

This is where I’m at. Sorry typo on my part it’s the 192.168.194.x network.

I mean go down to the device list and get the bridge zerotier ip (the device that has both zerotier and is sitting on your home network with bridging enabled). Here’s what that looks like for me:

with the ip 192.168.2.1

EDIT: I assumed that you’re using a bridging device for this setup. If not, could you describe your whole network layout (what zerotier devices are where and on what networks and how are they configured)

My setup is about 5 hours old.

I have a typical netgear router. 192.168.1.1

I have a connections on OneTier none are setup with bridging enabled.

I assume you mean i should enable bridging on one of my devices and use that?

Does anything else need to be done? Like refresh connections or additional setup of the bridge?

I’m not sure what you’re trying to accomplish. I assume you want to connect to your home network remotely. In another post you made, it seems like you’re trying to connect to plex remotely. In order to connect to a device on your local network you have three options:

1: Install zerotier on that device and then just use its zerotier IP
2: Install zerotier on some device on the local network you want access to and then use ethernet bridging (this gives access to any device on the network, not just the bridge)
3: Same as 2, but use a more advanced network ip forwarding to bridge the networks.

Which of those are you trying to do? I assume 1 or 2?

#2. I’m effectively trying to setup a “site VPN” so that when I’m away from home, all the devices on my 192.168.1.x network are accessible when i flip zeroteir on.

Since some of my stuff can’t have zero tier (lightbulbs, smart devices, NAS contiainers) if I can have them all accessible that would be ideal.

I enabled bridging on one of my devices and then navigated to a web server on the network (that i can access on the lan) and it wasn’t working. Pinging it also didn’t work.

Did you add the bridge to the routes with its zerotier address?

Yes. 192.168.194.23 is set as a bridge. Please let me know if i have to do something silly like reset a connection after setting it as the bridge. I’m brand new to this tool.

Okay, so I think you probably need to configure the bridge to forward traffic as described here: https://zerotier.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SD/pages/224395274/Route+between+ZeroTier+and+Physical+Networks

What type of machine is your bridge?

EDIT: So going back and reading more things I think that there’s two ways to do this. Through routes. and the through ethernet bridging. For bridging, I think you’d have to setup a bridged network on your bridge machine that bridges the zerotier and lan interfaces. For routing, you need to configure IP forwarding on your bridge and then use the zerotier managed routes. All the info that I can find online is about the latter method and not the former.

So then I don’t think you need ethernet bridging enabled. But you do need to configure IP forwarding as described in that link above

EDIT 2: See Protocol Design Whitepaper | ZeroTier Documentation for more info about bridging. Bridging would essentially let you use zerotier as a virtual network switch without any of the higher level management. There wouldn’t really be two networks then, but one network where zerotier IP address are part of the same address space as your home network. Ethernet Bridging | OpenVPN Here’s more detailed info about it from openvpn

Yikes. I was hoping it was just a setting. Linux and Network routes give me a headache. LOL.

I will read through this. The bridge is a ZeroTier docker container on my NAS. I could make it somethig else if i had to.

Thanks for hanging in there with me.

See edit above. This stuff also gives me a headache. I spent the past 6 hours trying to get DNS working on my configuration.

Ok thanks. I’ve reread. I’m going to have to study this. What’s tough is that all the videos I’m finding on youtube are like way over my head and presume I know networking very well.

Thanks for the heads up on DNS. I have a dns server in my setup too. Looks like I’m in for a long ride. LOL

You probably can get away with the IP forwarding shown in that article and things will just work. I have no idea how networking works with docker though. I’ve never touched it, so someone else will have to chime in there.

The problems I had with DNS are that zerotier doesn’t support NetworkManager on linux (and like a week ago started supporting systemd-networkd) so I was trying to figure out how to add DNS domains manually for a particular interface in NetworkManager. If you have a similar setup I can share what I did. I also wanted IPV6 to work, which is its own thing.

ok thanks. I’ve got a bunch of windows based machiens i can make a bridge if it is easier.

thanks for the dns info.

If you try bridging, I’d be curious how it goes. It might be easier. No idea. It definitely is different and does different things (as far as I can tell essentially making one larger network instead of an independent zerotier and lan).

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