my home network isnt trustworthy and i cant change anything about it becuase its not mine. my mom has a virus on her computer and she doesnt let me do anything about it (she says im trying to spy on her and ill mess with her stuff even though the virus is spyware lol)
also i go in public and use the wifi i dont want a virus or be spyed on anywhrre (i hate shcool) you cant go in the back and mess with other peoples stuff
im using framework (12 i think) with qubes but i want to use a normal computer with a normal gamnig distro (the framework will explode if i use qubes and play games im sure) (if i could play games on qubes privately it would make me very happy)
wqat do i do
for home there are small and cheap travel routers you can use - gl.inet has some that i would recommend but there are other options too (they are roughly the volume of a phone and ~$30)
Get a second router, have it connect to the main router as a client. All your trusted devices should only connect to the second router. No need to worry about the setup of your client devices that way.
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Pretty common solution these days too. So many of us have routers that were gifted to us by the isp, and the ability to configure them properly has been stripped out.
That’s actually my current setup.
Yeah, using a second router as a gateway seems easiest. It wouldn’t be a VLAN. It’d be an actual LAN.
Only problem I see is that UPnP might have some trouble with that style of configuration. Games might be able to automatically create the NAT for the local gateway but I don’t know if they’d properly traverse the second gateway to the internet without losing the route back.
i have ten dollars and 32 cents and asking for a router would be weird i will get laughed at (also if you take a whole router to a public place you will be clowned on or go to jail idk)
Not sure where you live. But Wi-Fi routers are often given away for free on Facebook marketplace and buy-nothing groups.
Depending on your level of technical skill, there are other options. If you can get a free really old garbage computer that runs, you could install Linux on that with a firewall and tailscale, and nothing else. Then you connect your phone or laptop to tailscale as a vpn, with that computer as the exit node. Then no matter where you are, your traffic is going through that really secure firewalled Linux computer.
thx 👍
You could also do this with a single device and a VM. Add a network bridge on the host connect both the host and a openwrt VM to it. And pass on the actual interface to the VM.
Be aware that you will have no privacy on the school’s network. They usually block all known VPN endpoints, and require certs that will allow MiTM even for HTTPS connections. For lotsa reasons it’s best to cleanly separate personal activity, from school activity. Or work activity when you get a job.
Since you mentioned “gaming distro”… what I do for private gaming is buy games from GOG. Every one I ever tried runs fine even with no network access. You can use sth like firejail to do this super easy. No need to set up a VM or w/e. Then you know it isn’t phoning home. B/c it can’t!
Plus, all their games are DRM-free. Which is part of what makes them private. I’d rather my dollars support DRM-free stuff. Supply and demand. The more ppl buy DRM games, the more it teaches game vendors that we don’t care. There are other DRM-free stores too. Stay away from Steam. Go for GOG, Humble, and w/e else. Then you can have private gaming.
privacy on a local network is an excellent use case for a virtual private network (vpn). your network traffic between your computer and the provider will be encrypted. i’d also look into dns-over-https, which will also encrypt your dns record requests. if everything is set up properly, the only things visible from the home network will be encrypted dns record requests out to your dns provider, and encrypted traffic to your vpn provider and back. however, with the virus on your mothers computer, i would consider the whole network compromised. you can try and harden against local intrusion, but using a vpn will not protect you from a virus, only prevent it from knowing about your traffic if its sniffing from another computer.
A VPN can absolutely protect you from hostile software elsewhere on the network, so long as you don’t accept traffic from any source other than the VPN. Doing that correctly is a fairly sophisticated thing to do though, and a sufficiently sophisticated threat might find a way to attack you still.
It all depends on your own technical ability and whether you’re protecting yourself from a script kiddie or palantir.
what would protect it without doing anything off of my device?
You are already using linux, no need to worry about windows viruses. You can also enable your firewall, if need to be more paranoid.
No, you need your net to be vlan aware.
but do you need the net to set it up?