How to SSH to your home computer remotely using ZeroTier for VPN

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Before getting a Mac, Dell XPS 15 with Ubuntu setup was my work horse. After getting a Mac with with M1 chip, XPS 15, and specifically its Intel processor, was very useful when I had to work with x86-only software such as VirtualBox with Vagrant. ZeroTier's VPN was a perfect solution for me since it allowed me to setup a simple way to connect to my XPS from university, public transportation, etc. easily and securely.

ZeroTier is one of my favorite ways to setup P2P VPN to allow SSH sessions with remote desktops and/or remote servers. Essentially, ZeroTier creates an encrypted tunnel between its server and your clients and forwards packets between your devices as if they were on a local network. It just works!

Here I will go over a very simple ZeroTier setup between local laptop and remote machine.

First you will need to create a network using ZeroTier website.

  1. Go to https://my.zerotier.com/ (opens in a new tab) and login/register.
  2. After registration go to the dashboard and click "Create Network".
  3. Take note of "Network ID". Also make sure that your network is Private.

Now go to each of the clients and run:

curl -s https://install.zerotier.com | sudo bash
sudo zerotier-cli join NETWORK_ID

Your clients will join the network on the ZeroTier dashboard, but you still need to authenticate them:

  1. Go to your network on https://my.zerotier.com/ (opens in a new tab)

  2. Give name to your devices under "Members" section and click "Auth?" flag.

Your VPN tunnel is all set up!

Now lets setup SSH connection between remote server machine(XPS in my case) and laptop(Mac for me):

On remote machine:

  1. Setup ssh-server with sudo apt-get install ssh-server
  2. Check if it is working by running sudo service ssh status
  3. You can also setup your ssh server with sudo vim /etc/ssh/ssh_config

You can now connect to remote machine with: ssh username@zerotier-ip-address

Now, lets make connection easier by sharing ssh keys:

  1. If you don't have an existing ssh key on your laptop, generate it with
ssh-keygen -t ed25519
  1. Copy to your remote machine:
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/mykey username@zerotier-ip-address
  1. Connect to remote machine with
ssh -i ~/.ssh/mykey username@zerotier-ip-address
  1. To avoid using verbose command, in ~/.ssh/config add an entry:
Host some_name
    HostName zerotier-ip-address
    User username
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/mykey
    ServerAliveInterval 60

You can now connect to remote machine simply with: ssh some_name

Here you go! A simple way to ssh to your remote devices without much overhead or setup! Leave a comment and a like if this helped your setup

© Taras Priadka.RSS