VPN for all local network traffic

[John_322]

Hello!
I currently have Microsoft Internet Connection Sharing on a machine with an internet connection. It works great and I can access the internet from all other machines on the network. I would like to add some privacy to internet traffic for all users of the network by using a VPN service. Rather than install client VPN software on all of the machines (and I think lots of services only allow for one device anyway), I'm wondering whether it's possible to install that client software on the ICS machine and have all internet traffic from other network users automatically go through the VPN... would that work, or can anyone see any technical reasons why that wouldn't work!?!

Thanks for any comments in advance,
Jack

 

[bill001g]

If you had a linux machine the answer is yes you can do it. Windows especially with ICS is pretty nasty. The vpn client you run on the ICS machine would have to allow the ICS to in effect share its virtual adapter.

If that is all the machine is doing I would load one of the many linux router images or maybe even load something like the pfsense firewall. It will be much easier than trying to use ICS. ICS tends to be unstable even when you are doing simple things. Remember this is a feature that was designed to allow you to share a dialup modem with multiple machines. Not a lot has been added to it in all these years.

 

[svalbaard]

Alternatively you can see if you can flash your router with DDWRT or similar and enable/configure the inbuilt OpenVPN client from there. That will encrypt all outgoing IP data packets from any device on your network from one easily managed location. Bear in mind you will see a drop in bandwidth speed and/or router throughput as the router CPU takes an overhead for all of the additional encryption/decryption i.e. if you subscribe to a 50MBps service, you might see this reported as 15MBps if you do a generic web based broadband speed test.

There is loads of this sort of stuff on the Small Network Builder site forums.

Hope that helps.