I have been experimenting with various data acquisition and streaming devices in my race car.
There is a PepWare BR1 router in the RC with an LTE connection to the internet through a standard carrier connection.

Unfortunately, some of the streaming devices in the RC can only be configured by an APP on the same LAN (in the same address space).
Practically, that means only when in the pits. I'd like to have access all the time when the car is on track.

If my BR1 supports VPNs (which it says it does), can a person connect an iPhone (with a person in the pits) to the streaming device by also connecting the iphone to the same VPN thereby creating a WAN-WAN bridge?

Do I need to get an account on a VPN service (like NORD)? Alternatively, I have a Synology NAS back home on the internet - can that serve as the VPN server?

Apologies, but I'm sure some of these questions telegraph my lack of understanding of basic IP and VPN networking. It's been awhile.

DB

 

We did a large Pepwave deployment a number of years back for a meter reading application that required the same layer 2 connectivity. We used Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol to set up a Layer 2 VPN between 2 Pepwave devices that bridged the network for us. I think Pepwave refers to this as Layer 2 PepVPN now. So you would have a BRI in the PIT (Wifi or LTE), the LTE BRI in the car, and then you can connect to the pit BRI with a laptop or phone on the same subnet as the car. Make sense?

 

I think that gives me a good head start! I already have a Pepware Surf on the Go which appears to support PepVPN, so I can do some testing with that and the BR1 before investing in another BR1 or otherwise.

 

Well, after some experimenting I am not having much luck. As I don't have more than one BR1, I tried to create a PEPVPN tunnel between the BR1 (in race car) and a Pepwave Surf on the Go travel router. Unfortunately neither side ever made it past a status of "starting...." or "connecting".

It seems like each side is looking for a public IP address (although docs say only needed on one side). However, the public IP address is dynamic for the BR1 on LTE; but the other side (the Surf on the Go) won't accept a blank public IP to connect to.

It would be nice if there was a public PEPVPN to test against/conect to because otherwise I'm just stuck.

I have the Surf on the Go configured as WAN over WIFI (my home network) and the BR1 configured as a standard LTE setup.

Any ideas on how to test or other things to try are appreciated.

It's also possible that the Surf on the Go has an outdated implementation of PepVPN - it seems a bit old and the firmware dates back a few years with no updates.

 

It doesn’t look like Pepwave supports LT2P server behind NAT so you will need a public IP.

Does the LTE interface get a public IP from the provider upon connection? If so, you could enter it into the Pit router at each track. I know the providers offer static IPs or private clouds for LTE for larger networks but I’m not sure about on a “one off” basis.

An easier option would probably be to get a static IP at your house and setup a Pepwave BRI as an L2TP server there and have both the car and pit routers connect to it. I haven’t verified that you can bridge L2TP across it but you should be able to in theory.

 

I was thinking something similar. I have a Synology NAS at home running a VPN Server - I could have the BR1 in the race car connect to it along with my local PC at the track.

I also thought of another solution. In the race car is a Raspberry pi I use to capture some car telemetry real time and connect to it using VNC from anywhere. Once connected to the pi with VNC, I just open a browser and then have access to all on board resources.