Synclias

What is it?

With modern changes going on on the internet, I need a VPN for some things, but it’s not ideal to route everything over it. Some sites don’t like them, sometimes I want to play a game and speed matters. I don’t want have VPN clients on all my devices that are on my network.

Synclias is a best effort tool to route specific websites over a VPN for OPNsense routers.

You configure a VPN on OPNsense, and tell Synclias some websites, it’ll discover all the links and then adjust the firewall to route, then it’ll set up a schedule to repeat the process daily/hourly etc.

For the techie people already saying “That doesn’t work” - I get it, and I’ve got a page for you.

For everyone else:

What does “best effort” mean?

Websites move about, they change IP address every so often, but there’s things we can do to monitor that and adjust, but there’s a few scenarios where a site moves and we’re not up to date. If that happens, you’ll fall back to a connection in your country. At which point, you can force a re-sync or turn on a VPN client.

So how useful is it?

It won’t work for all sites, don’t try it for Google etc, but I use it to sync the route for an image hosting website to the UK so forums I use work. It also works for most of those sites… And because it’s on the router, every device on your network works, if you want it to.

It started as a python script I threw together one night and worked so well I turned it into this, and I only sync every 24 hours. Of the three devices I use daily - laptop, computer and phone, I’ve never had to use a VPN on my computer or phone, it’s always got there first.

What’s it not for?

Most of the stuff you don’t use a VPN for now, the big sites - google, youtube, reddit etc. Reddit blocks VPNs, Google/Youtube will work, but they’ll know you’re on a VPN and may turn on some extra stuff for logins etc.

What happens if it all breaks?

The only thing we apply changes to is a “Firewall Alias”, a group on your router. Any problems, just delete everything in the alias, and it’ll be like nothing happened.

We’ll walk you through setting that up, so you’ll know exactly where to go.

The Overview is where your users find out about your project. Depending on the size of your docset, you can have a separate overview page (like this one) or put your overview contents in the Documentation landing page (like in the Docsy User Guide).

Try answering these questions for your user in this page:

What is it?

Introduce your project, including what it does or lets you do, why you would use it, and its primary goal (and how it achieves it). This should be similar to your README description, though you can go into a little more detail here if you want.

Why do I want it?

Help your user know if your project will help them. Useful information can include:

• What is it good for?: What types of problems does your project solve? What are the benefits of using it?

• What is it not good for?: For example, point out situations that might intuitively seem suited for your project, but aren’t for some reason. Also mention known limitations, scaling issues, or anything else that might let your users know if the project is not for them.

• What is it not yet good for?: Highlight any useful features that are coming soon.

Where should I go next?

Give your users next steps from the Overview. For example:

• Getting Started: Get started with $project
• Examples: Check out some example code!