I hear you, but that’s assuming that ZeroTier can be run all those devices. Computers, sure, but there’s all the IOT type devices that one may want access to. And while they may be fixed, the devices you want to access them with aren’t.
I’m currently using ZeroTier like this:
House 1 in country 1: “My” Macbook and Mac Mini running Zerotier
House 2 in country 2: Macbook and Mac Mini and QNAP NAS running Zerotier
Other devices in both places that can’t run ZeroTier.
The two Macbooks get taken out of the houses.
Now Zerotier has been truly awesome (and Teamviewer has been long forgotten) in that My Macbook can access any of those computers wherever I am, or indeed if the other Macbook is taken outside the house.
BUT with ZeroTier on those devices alone I can’t access any of the other devices like IOT stuff, modems, routers, etc in either house when I am on the road. Yes, I could VPN into House 1 pfSense router, but then it gets overcomplicated. If I was running Zerotier on the routers in both houses and directly on the 2 Macbooks, then I’d have a seamless network of all devices all the time.
A standard VPN (Phone home to Router1) isn’t going to give me the seamless bi-directional connection between two houses and roaming devices that ZeroTier offers. One of the great things about ZeroTier is I get always-on connections FROM a home network TO roaming devices wherever they are… Perhaps it could be done with some combination of ZeroTier and site-to-site VPNs but seems complicated to me. If I could run Zerotier on both routers and on the roaming devices directly that would seem a good setup to me.
That said, as I have a pfSense router, not OPNSense, I haven’t had the opportunity to try ZeroTier at the router level so I’m guessing somewhat. And I also don’t have experience with site-to-site VPNs, I’ve only ever used them to call home. But even then connecting home requires manually initiating a connection etc and can’t compare to the always-on nature of ZeroTier.
So I’d be genuinely interested to hear of possibly better or easier ways to do all this, I have an open mind to all this.
I do see what you mean about the point of Zerotier being *“to set it up on each device that needs to be part of a network without concern of what network they are actually on, either same or remote.” But I’m looking to achieve that AND have all devices in each house on the ZeroTier subnet regardless of whether then can run the ZeroTier software themselves.