How to customise routing and share your Route Sentry connections.

Sharing your Route Sentry connection

XP's ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) won't work with more than 1 connection at a time (as used by Route Sentry), so what do you do?

• Method 1: Using  a Proxy
  
  

The first and simplest option is to install a proxy server on your Route Sentry PC and then simply configure your other PCs to make use of this proxy. DDProxy is perfect for this, and best of all it's free. The downside to this method is that some applications and games won't work through a proxy.

• Method 2: Using a VPN (Virtual Private Network)

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

This particular solution makes use of the nice and simple iPig VPN client/server to handle the connection sharing, and a free DNS server app called Treewalk.

The first thing you need to is is install a DNS server on the PC running Route Sentry:

1. Download TreeWalk DNS server (free for personal use) from http://www.ntcanuck.com/
2. Start up Route Sentry and have it connect to both connections
3. Install TreeWalk DNS (after Route Sentry 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.

5. Configure the Route Sentry PC to make use of a fixed IP address (e.g. 192.168.0.100). To do this: Click Start, click Control Panel, right click on your "Local Area Connection", select Properties, Select 'Internet Protocol', click 'Properties', Select 'Use the following IP address' and enter the address you'd like to use. The Subnet mask should be 255.255.255.0, leave the default gateway blank. Set the 'Preferred DNS server' to 127.0.0.1 (to make use of the local 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 Route Sentry PC. Start iPig Server 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 Route Sentry PC as ‘Preferred DNS server’. (Use the fixed IP address you configured on the Route Sentry PC, e.g. 192.168.0.100).

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 Route Sentry 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 Route Sentry 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!  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.

Controlling Route Sentry Routing

All "local" routes are stored in the localroutes.dat file found in the Route Sentry folder. Each line contains an IP address and a network mask that defines a particular local route. By modifying this file you can control which IP addresses will get routed through the local connection. As this IP,mask format can be a little tricky to work with I've written a utility (masktool) that converts any IP range into this format. Download it here: http://antibody.za.net/files/masktool.exe

• Example

I make use of dyndns and have a dyndns client app running on my PC. This app connects to the dyndns server every so often in order for the IP address to be kept up to date. Now because I have Route Sentry active this connection will get routed via the 'international' connection, thus dyndns returns my 'international' IP address. This is a problem because I want to be able to connect to my PC's local connection when using Remote Desktop or whatever. So the solution is to add the dyndns server's IP address to the localroutes.dat file.