How to share your RouteSentry split connections to other LAN PCs

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ant1b0dy

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How to share your RouteSentry connections

More info about RouteSentry is available here:
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?t=39234&highlight=routesentry

After a lot of playing around with my PCs I’ve come up with a ‘free’ and fairly simple way of sharing RouteSentry’s split Internet connections that doesn’t involve making use of proxies, or running RouteSentry on multiple PCs (which can be a problem if your accounts have limited concurrent connections).

With this solution all Internet traffic is automatically routed through the RouteSentry PC so games and apps that require internet access will be able to connect ‘directly’ without any special proxy configs etc.

To accomplish this I'm using a nice and simple VPN client/server app called iPig which handles the connection sharing, and a free DNS server app called TreeWalk.

The first thing you need is a DNS server installed on the PC running RouteSentry:

1. Download TreeWalk DNS server (free for personal use) from http://www.ntcanuck.com/
2. Start up RouteSentry and have it connect to both connections
3. Install TreeWalk DNS (after RouteSentry has connected) – during the configuration part of the install it will pop up with a message about the fact that you connect to the net via a dial up and that it won’t update your DNS settings. Just continue the installation.
4. After installation restart the PC and the DNS service should be active. NB: Remember to open up port 53 on your firewall to allow other PCs to make use of this DNS service.

Next you need to install VPN server/client software. iPig (free for up to 5 VPN users) is actually designed for wifi security but it works well for internet sharing too. The PRO version costs $99 and allows for unlimited user connections.

1. Download both the freeware SERVER and CLIENT installs from http://www.iopus.com/ipig/
2. Install iPig SERVER on the RouteSentry PC. Start it up and add one or more VPN users via the ‘Users’ screen. Each user can have a bandwidth limit set which is quite handy.
3. Make sure that you open up the iPig server port on your firewall (port 11888 by default) otherwise no clients will be able to connect.
4. On each client PC go to the network card’s properties (Control Panel, Network connections, right click on your network card and click ‘Properties’), double click ‘Internet protocol’, select the ‘Use the following DNS server addresses’ radio button and enter the IP address of the RouteSentry PC as ‘Preferred DNS server’. (You’ll need to make sure that the RouteSentry PC has a fixed IP address for this to work).
5. Install the iPig client software on each ‘client’ PC. After a restart you will need to configure each client to connect to your own iPig server. Configure your server details on the ‘Advanced settings’ page – select the ‘Use your own iPig server’ option and enter the IP address of the RouteSentry PC, along with the port number used (default is 11888). On the user page you would enter your iPig user name and password as defined in step 2.
6. Once your iPig client is connected (and RouteSentry is active on the internet PC) you should be able to access the internet from any application, and the traffic is still routed through either the local or international connections! :D Remember to disable any proxy settings in IE or other programs as you won’t need them any more. If IE keeps prompting you to ‘Connect’ or ‘Work online’ whenever you try to access the internet then from IE select ‘Tools’, ‘Connections’, select ‘Never dial a connection’ then click on OK.

I hope this works for you because it's working great for me! :D Also, If you knows of any other apps that work like iPig (but are free) please let me know.
 
Last edited:
Wow! Thanks a lot this should really help.
 
HvRooyen said:
AFAIK: iPig, Hamachi, OpenVPN.
See http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm - episodes 14-19.
Click to expand...

I tried Hamachi first but as far as I could tell you needed an internet connection on the client PC already for it to work while I needed the VPN to work on my LAN.

I also looked at OpenVPN but it looked pretty complicated to set up so I moved on to iPig which worked without much fuss.

If anyone manages to get this connection sharing to work with Hamachi or
OpenVPN please post here with the details of how you did it.
 
So would my computer running iPig need to have two network cards? One for the WAN connection, and one to the network switch/wireless router?
 
Hey guys,

Did anyone else besides antibody get this ipig and dns thing to work right on your network with two or more pc's ?

I am struggling to get mine to work. I followed all of the instructions but for some reason my client pc doesnt want to connect to the Ipig server on the route sentry pc. The Ipig client keeps on telling me that the ipig server disconnected , and gives me a unknown server error. I did open up both of those ports 53 and 11888 on my firewall.

With the dns settings on my side (route sentry pc it is 127.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2)

If any can help me, it will be greatly appreciated, just ask me any info you might need to help me nail the problem. I really want to get it up and running before 2morrow, cause a friend is coming over and we want to play online.

Please, any advice will be welcomed.

PS: I have a 4port ethernet router and I plugged the 2nd pc into it.
 
Hello I'm having the same problem. All the ports are forwarded correctly. Could it be that DHCP is causing a problem?
 
StoneCold said:
Hey guys,

Did anyone else besides antibody get this ipig and dns thing to work right on your network with two or more pc's ?

I am struggling to get mine to work. I followed all of the instructions but for some reason my client pc doesnt want to connect to the Ipig server on the route sentry pc. The Ipig client keeps on telling me that the ipig server disconnected , and gives me a unknown server error. I did open up both of those ports 53 and 11888 on my firewall.

With the dns settings on my side (route sentry pc it is 127.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2)

If any can help me, it will be greatly appreciated, just ask me any info you might need to help me nail the problem. I really want to get it up and running before 2morrow, cause a friend is coming over and we want to play online.

Please, any advice will be welcomed.

PS: I have a 4port ethernet router and I plugged the 2nd pc into it.
Click to expand...

Have u tried changing the dns ip address to the ip address of the pc running routesentry?

Go start - run, type "cmd"

then in the command prompt type "ipconfig" and look wot ur ip is then add it as ur dns
 
Hmmm placid, haven't tried that yet, but i doubt any of my friends will be coming over to play online, seeing as every has their adsl now, but its something that i'll test before I format in the future.
 
I got all this to work:

RouteSentry is running off one PC on my network and the other in my room is connecting fine to the net but...

Everything so far seems to work fine, everything exept Internet Explorer and MSN Live Messenger.

Any ideas or help?
 
Setup Help

Hi All,

I have read what I can on setting up Route Sentry and RASPPOE but am still a little uncertain. I know how to put my router into Modem mode no problem. I have installed the Route Sentry application and RASPPOE. My questions are these:

* - The local and international connection drop downs in Route Sentry are empty, will these be populated once I have created dial up accounts?
* - The dial up accounts you create using RASPPOE, do they just ask for your username and password, as I dont have any specific IP addresses etc for my ISP's, I just enter my username and password into the modem router and it works

thnx
 
-the account just needs your username and password, and they should work.

-once you got the 2 dial up connections created, you need to open routesentry , the "local and international connection drop downs" should have options in them after you have created the dial up accounts, choose the local account for the local drop down and vice versa
 
Next Step

Hi

Thanks, thats what I thought

My next question is how does Route Sentry distinguish between Local Traffic and Internation traffic so that it can use the appropriate account

I am big into my online gaming and what I am trying to achieve in essence is that my one unshaped account is used soley for gaming and all other surfing etc uses my other shaped account

How do I specify which program uses which account?

Thnx
 
mbeylis,

Its quite easy. If you created your two dial-up connections, and entered the relevant passwords, all you need to do, is to open up route sentry and from the dropdown boxes, under Local Connection, select from the dropdown box your desired account local use,same goes for the account or other dial-up connection that you want to use for International.

In your case, you would then simply select the dial-up account (the unshaped one) for your local connection, and the other one for International.
You can then tick the boxes just to make sure that route sentry automatically redials the connection should either one of the accounts get disconnected.

And you can also click on the "Set up Routes" button. RS also does this automatically.

After all this, you can then just click on "Save Settings" and click on Close.

And your done...

:)
 
Hi,

Sorry for sounding stupid but why do I want the local account as my unshaped account and my international account as the shaped account?

I come back to my original question. How do the various programs on my machine know which account to use.

I play World of Warcraft on a UK server and only want World of Warcraft to use my Unshaped Account. Everything else must use the shaped account

How do I get this right?

Thnx

Mark
 
mbeylis, not sure if I understand correctly but RouteSentry is not made for what I think you are looking for. RouteSentry is used to differentiate between local and international IPs independent of what is being done (surfing, gaming, downloading.. its all treated the same). If I understand correctly, you are looking for something that differentiates between gaming and other activities and routes the connections based on this.. this is not what RouteSentry does.
 
Hi,

I think I got it figured out. Yes I know that Route Sentry is used to channel local and international traffic over the 2 different defined accounts. Thing is how does Route Sentry know what is local and what is international? The answer I think lies in the localroutes.dat file. When you access different ip addresses on the internet Route Sentry checks this file to see if it can find that ip address (range) in this file. If it can then it uses the "local" adsl account, if it cant find the ip address in this file then it uses the "international" account. So what I am trying to achieve is that only WOW accesses the "local" account. To do that I need to ensure that WOW only ever accesses one IP Address which i have already achieved through the use of SocksCap and Putty. So all I need to do it put the IP address of the server that WOW accesses into the localroutes.dat file and voila. This is the theory at least. will let you know if it works
 
If anyone has got this to work with getting a PC that has a NetGear WG311v3 PCI Wireless Card to acess a 802.11 signal broadcast by a Telkom ADSL 5102G router please PM me on how to do it or put it up here :)

For the PCI card (in the Netgear Wizard software), must I select "Access point" "or "computer-to-computer" ? The PCI card does not pick up the (WiFi) signal when I choose "computer-to-computer" but does when I select "access point". I assume I would need the computer-to-computer :confused:
 
Never mind, I just installed RASPPPoE on the "Wireless Conection" on PC#2 and put RouteSentry on :D Luckily my accounts allow multiple connections...

Bring on the day when I no longer need to split the two...
 
thanks for the amazing guide everything seems to work until I tried to go onto teamspeak and CSS servers, I can ping/connect to these from the Rout Sentry pc but the other pc’s on the network just cant connect/ping/see them, I placed the ip’s of these servers in the “localrouting” file to see if it would make a difference but nothing changed.

Can it be Rout Sentry blocking these ip’s for the other computers or do I need to change my dns / iPig clients/server.

please help :)
 
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