Can I uss sshuttle to help me with this proxying requirement?

[Chris Green]

This is probably slightly off topic but not wholly, so I hope people
will bear with me.

I visit France frequently, I have a little canal boat there. It has
an internet connection using a free.fr SIM in a TP-Link Archer MR200
router.

I have the occasional problem with UK web sites that fail to work if
they think you aren't in the UK (even though I'm a perefectly legal UK
user). One is my doctor's surgery, which is annoying if I need to make
a repeat prescription request before I return home. I believe
sshuttle will fix this for me as I can run it on my (xubuntu 22.04)
laptop connecting to my home machine (also xubuntu 22.04 and is always
on as it runs as my mail server). I've not tried this yet as I've
only just discovered sshuttle but I think there's no difficulty as
I'll be using the browser on my laptop and this will use the proxy
connection and appear to be in the UK. Job done.

However the more difficult problem I'm trying to solve is that I have
a Kobo Forma book reading tablet, it's like a Kindle but somewhat more
open, and works well with my library. This fails to connect
successfully when one tries to download books from outside the UK.
It only has WiFi, no wired ethernet, so I need some way to provide a
WiFi connection for it that will be proxied to a server in the UK.

I have a partial solution using a program called redsocks. I make a
wired connection from the laptop to the MR200 to give it internet
access, then I configure the laptop's WiFi to provide a hotspot, ssh
does the proxying and redsocks does some internal cleverness to get it
all to hang together.

However it's rather unreliable, it drops out repeatedly and the laptop
decides it wants to connect to other WiFi sources around. So I'm
lookng for a better solution.

If the TP-Link Archer MR200 ran openwrt it would be a perfect
solution, just install sshuttle on the openwrt router and that's it.
However this isn't an option as, even if openwrt can be run on the
MR200 I doubt if it will still support accessing the internet via a
SIM plugged into the router.

So, I guess the solution may be a 'two routers' solution. Get a
router that runs openwrt, install sshuttle on it and tell it to use
the MR200 for its connection to the internet. Does this make sense?

I.e. the connection from the Kobo Forma would be routed as follows:-

Kobo Forma
Wifi connection
'New' openwrt router running sshuttle
Wired etherenet from openwrt router WAN to MR200 LAN
TP-Link Archer MR200
4G 'mobile' internet connection
UK server with ssh account

If this works then all I need is a router that runs openwrt, has WiFi
and a wired WAN/upstream connection.

Will it work and any recommendations for an openwrt router that does
what I need please.

Sorry for such a long initial message to the group.

--
Chris Green

[Chris Green]

>
> I.e. the connection from the Kobo Forma would be routed as follows:-
>
> Kobo Forma
> Wifi connection
> 'New' openwrt router running sshuttle
> Wired etherenet from openwrt router WAN to MR200 LAN
> TP-Link Archer MR200
> 4G 'mobile' internet connection
> UK server with ssh account
>

As an alternative to this that might be easier to configure would a
Raspberry Pi instead of the openwrt router work OK? It would have to
be a Pi with WiFi of course and I'd have to configure the Pi's WiFi as
an access point rather than a WiFi client but otherwise it sounds
do-able.

--
Chris Green