I have a Dlink DSL 2750U ADSL2/2 Router at my home wherein I would like to connect it to a similar one at my office. I know about VPNs that can do the job but is it possible to establish such a connection using static routes? I don't know if this makes sense or is the right query.
Here is an image of how the setting appears on my Router:
Many thanks in advance.........
It (static routing) shouldn't work if you want to access local network behind router at your office or access home network from office because you can't route private IP ranges over internet.
Since your routers doesn't support VPN, a simple solution is to connect both of your local networks (home and office) over VPN by setting up on one of your home's computer and one at your office computer VPN service such as tinc. tinc support bridging ethernet segments, this way both of your networks will be connected to each other over secure tunnel allowing you to run applications that normally only work in local area network
A static route is not enough here, since it can only determine the immediate next hop (and that nexthop must itself be directly reachable).
The reason being that IP doesn't have separate header fields to reference both the destination and some distant gateway. So when a route via some gateway is configured, its IP address is never really put in the packets – it's only used to look up the gateway's MAC address and the packets are sent to that MAC address. Therefore the gateway itself must already be local.
(Actually there's a feature that existed in IP long ago but has since been removed, called "source routing". It allowed packets to describe the full or partial path that the packet should go, overriding each router's own decision. However, it ended up being very useful for breaking into private networks, but nearly useless for legitimate tasks, and was later removed.)
That said, you don't need a "full" VPN to do what you want. The simplest possible method would be an IP-in-IP tunnel (or the slightly more common GRE tunnel), which wraps the whole packet including its 'LAN' addresses inside another IP header which now can hold the IP address of a remote gateway.
Unfortunately, the D-Link firmware can do no such thing...
Short answer: If both your home and your office are connected to the Internet, there is a good 99.99% chance that proper routing between them is already established.
Long answer: A static route is a simple route in the routing table that is created manually, and not by routing protocols such as RIP or OSPF. All this technical details aside, however, it only makes sense when you know for certain that what you need to perform is changing how routing occurs in your router.
On the Internet manual routing makes little sense though. There are simply so many elements that are out of your control, including but not limited to all the network devices that make connecting your home to your office possible.
To connect your home to your office, the following prerequisites need to be established first:
The rest is really client-specific: i.e. for sharing files, you open File Explorer, type \\ in the address bar followed by the IP address of your office server and press Enter. Then you type in a username and password.
Also, you must know that without VPN, your connection may or may not be secure. e.g., file and printer sharing connection is not secure, but connection to an internal office web server that supports HTTPS is secure.
