Tunneling a printer from a home network to a VPN

For the past few years, I have been using a self-hosted VPN to bring all my personal devices into the same “network” even though many of them are spread across various locations and physical networks. This system never gives me problems, but there was one thing I wished I could do: access non-VPN devices on other networks using one of my VPN devices as a gateway.

Of course, I could actually grab a RaspberryPI and turn it into a real network gateway for the VPN, allowing me to access anything I want as long as it was attached to that PI’s network interface. This setup was not entirely practical though, as I wanted the ability to pull multiple devices from multiple networks into my VPN.

Doing a quick search for solutions around the internet lead me to find a bunch of long and visually complex iptables commands I could run, but I wanted something much simpler. Further searching lead me to find socat.

Socat is a command line based utility that establishes two bidirectional byte streams and transfers data between them. Because the streams can be constructed from a large set of different types of data sinks and sources (see address types), and because lots of address options may be applied to the streams, socat can be used for many different purposes. [manpages socat(1)]

As stated in the Linux manpages, socat is essentially a port-forwarding utility. Using this, I am able to expose my local printer to my VPN through a RaspberryPI using this short command:

socat tcp-listen:9100,reuseaddr,fork tcp:<printer_ip>:9100

I have also published a small tool called localexpose that does the same thing with a bit of a nicer argument syntax.