Once your phone or laptop is connected to your WireGuard VPN, your device acts exactly as if it were physically sitting inside your house. This opens up incredible possibilities for remote access.
Overview
A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is often marketed as a way to hide your location or pirate movies. But a self-hosted VPN like WireGuard on LocalNode serves a completely different purpose: it is a private bridge from the public internet into your personal home network.
Accessing your LocalNode apps
The most common use case is accessing the apps running on your server when you aren't home.
- Toggle the WireGuard VPN to ON on your smartphone.
- Open your browser and navigate to
http://localnode.local or the internal IP (e.g., 192.168.1.50). - You will see your main dashboard load instantly.
Because the VPN handles the routing, all your mobile apps (like Immich and Jellyfin) that are configured to point to localnode.local will continue to work flawlessly over cellular data, as long as the VPN is turned on.
💡 Tip: If localnode.local fails to load over the VPN, it means your device isn't resolving mDNS queries through the tunnel. You can simply use the IP address and port instead (e.g., 192.168.1.50:8096 for Jellyfin).
Accessing other home devices
The VPN doesn't just give you access to the LocalNode server itself; it gives you access to your entire home Wi-Fi network.
- Router Admin Panel: If you need to reboot your Wi-Fi router while on vacation, just connect to the VPN and navigate to
192.168.1.1. - Smart Home Hubs: If you have a Philips Hue bridge, a Hubitat, or a home security camera system that doesn't have cloud access, you can access their local IP addresses through the VPN.
- Network Printers: Believe it or not, you can send a document to your home Wi-Fi printer from a coffee shop in another country, and it will print in your home office.
Securing public Wi-Fi
If you connect your laptop to the free Wi-Fi at an airport or coffee shop, the network administrator (and potentially hackers on the same network) can see which websites you are visiting.
By connecting to your WireGuard VPN while on public Wi-Fi, you encrypt 100% of your internet traffic. The coffee shop router only sees an encrypted stream of data flowing to your house. Your home router then forwards the traffic to the actual website.
To the rest of the internet, it appears as though you are browsing from your living room, keeping your passwords and banking data perfectly safe.
⚠️ Warning: If you use WireGuard to secure public Wi-Fi, your internet speed will be limited by your home internet's Upload speed. If you have slow upload speeds at home (e.g., 10 Mbps on standard cable), your download speed at the coffee shop will also max out at 10 Mbps.
Next Steps
Need help? Email hello@localnode.tech or visit localnode.tech/contact.