TL-WR710N VPN Settings

By popular demand:

Once you got your second router which supports L2TP or PPTP on the WAN interface, you can start settings up this little device. I used a TL-WR710N  by TP-Link. Small and handy. Other produkts might work too, I especially recall the TP-Link and D-Link routers to support this. But before you buy check whether they do support it or not.

So what else do you need besides this second router? Well, an ethernet cable to connect it to the original Base-Router and of course an active VPN-subscription of your choice. You will need an provider which overs pptp or L2tp access. But most do. Just check their packages avaibilbe or chat with the support.

Just a small reminder here again:

What are we trying to achieve?

1. Connect a router to a VPN server
2. Provide the VPN connection to multiple devices
3. All without flashing special firmware to a router, NO guarantee voided!
4. Using a 2nd cheap router as VPN router, NO interference with existing setup 

I am using the TL-WR710N as example here. Should be similar for other devices though!

prerequisite: Working home wifi/network with base-router. Connect the VPN-router WAN-port to a regular LAN-port on your base router. Power up the VPN router. Connect to the new VPN-router Wifi and do the "Quicksetup", or use a wired connection from the VPN-router LAN-port to your Laptop/PC.

Now you got a second, secluded wifi/network running on the VPN-router. To turn this network into a VPN routed one, go to "Network", "WAN" and change the connection Type to L2TP or PPTP and input your server credentials. Change the MTU value down to 1400. This fixes some issues while surfing. Choose "Connect Automatically", Hit SAVE and you are done. Every device (iPhone, AppleTV, Laptop, PC) connected to this VPN-router (wireless or wired) will be routed thru the VPN-server and avoid any GEO-blocking.

Virtual Ethernet LAN cable

As an ongoing effort, I am trying to connect my different homes and flats with some kind of VPN so that we can all share the same resources. I recently tried connecting my routers (which run DDWRT or TomatoUSB) with some kind of client/server construction based on PPTP or openVPN. Neither of the protocols were to my satisfaction as openVPN requires routers with more flashmemory and ddwrt is a mess with its GUI.

Enter... Softether

http://www.softether.org/4-docs/2-howto/1.VPN_for_On-premise/3.LAN_to_LAN_Bridge_VPN

I stumbled upon this nice piece of software one day as I was looking a solution again for my problem. It is just perfect for me. It's a bit similar to Hamachi, but in my oppinion even a bit handier.

Imagine Softether being a virtual network cable expanding your existing home network with a virtual lan cable going to a virtual "cloud switch". Adding Softether to all your different home networks amd connecting them to the same cloud switch just connects all your networks on layer 2! Its really like pulling network cables from all your places to one central switch without actually pulling real cables between your homes/flats.

Those virtual network cables are route through a special VPN tunnel and terminat in the virtual hub in the cloud. The network really behaves like being linked with a regular patch cable! It works so good, that I even was assigned an IP address from router A's DHCP pool, even though I was actually on router B's physical net ("problem" was solved by enabling "Filter DHCP packets on Virtual Switch").

So, like I said, this can be used to merge multiple networks to one big one. I am using this even on the same TCP/IP subnet 192.168.67.0, here is how:

Router A has 192.168.67.1 with DHCP pool ...2-...99
Router B has ...100 with DHCP pool ...101-...149
Router C has ...150 with DHCP pool ...151-...199

Every router is by default the gateway of its physical network, but all devices are in the same subnet. Using printers, IP-cams, NAS like on your homenetwork.

My network C is in an VoIP restricted country. I can't use SIP over there. Ports blocked, deep packet inspections running on ISP side, SIP via VPN is not as easy too. Because you can't port-forward thru VPN that easy. So my SIP-phone on network C is configured manually to use IP 192.168.67.254 (out of every DHCP pool) and use 192.168.67.1 as gateway and DNS. Router A has a portforward on port 5060 to 192.168.67.254, so it is reachable from outside.

Sounds like a nice setup right?

But now even better: Softether of course requires to run on each physical network segment you want to connect with each other. You could put it on a regular desktop machine and its fine. But it needs to run 24/7 so that the virtual cable is up. But that'S not preferable solution, too much waste energy.

Enter ... Raspberry Pi

There is a Linux ARM build available from Softether. So easy to install, so low energy, such wow, so lol.

2GB SD card. fresh debian for Raspberry, connect raspberry with router (lan cable), power the raspberry (i used usb port of routers!), ssh into your Pi, apt-get update upgrade, expand filesystem, set timezone

meanwhile set up dhcp reservation for the pi, portforward 5555 to pi  (only necessary for server pi)

ServerPi: wget latest Softether Server ARM EABI build for Pi, follow these blog post more or less:

http://tomearp.blogspot.de/2013/11/setting-up-l2tpipsec-vpn-with-softether.html

Client Pis: wget latest Softether Bridge ARM EABI build for Pi, same procedure like server just replace server everywhere with bridge

I even doubt anyone will ever read this but if someone ever does and is stuck, just comment. Just a rough sketch of what to do.

To config all the settings on the Pis just use the "Server manager Tool" on any desktop machine and connect to the Pis IP. There you can setup everything. All you need to do on the Pis is installing Softether moduls and ensuring the autostart on boot. The whole config stuff is easy made from normal computer with nice GUI

Good solution TL-WR710N

Usually the instructions given by the VPN providers are tailored to some special firmwares called DD-WRT, Tomato, Open-WRT and so on which have to be installed onto your router. I have done that with many routers, works fine, is okay.

But the much easier way is to just use a router, fresh from the shelf, cheap, easy to set up and no fuzzing around with your existing model. Maybe it's just a rental and you void warranty if you start installing diffrent firmwares on the router. Maybe there is no DDWRT or Tomato or whatever for the model which is sitting in your home.

So my advice, don't fuzz around with your existing setup/router. Get a seperate "VPN-router". Why? Well, you can still use your normal internet without VPN by just switching the the wifi network back to your "normal" one or plugging the LAN cable back to the old router which has been there all the time. Maybe VPN servers are down, your subscription is over or you just want that little extra of speed again back (using VPN connection often introduces a bottleneck which reduces your internet speeds). And if you mess up the configuration of the VPN router, you can always fall back to the good old normal router with just perfectly fine working internet.

So what model should you get as VPN router? Well you could buy expensive enterprise equipment. They often advert with features like "VPN ready" etc... But that's a bit of an overkill. maybe with an normal soho router like the one you already have, maybe just another model which has DD-WRT OpenWRT Tomato Support? Yeah, that would be a solution. I have done that a lot. But there are tons of "how-to"s for that everywhere else but here. The even simpler solution:

TL-WR710N by TP-Link

Before anybody says anything. You can use any other router, it just needs to support L2TP or PPTP on the WAN-side. That's all. I am sure there are many other devices as well which can do this. I know many D-Link can as well.

The WR710N is very versatile and thus the ideal router for this purpose. It support many VPN-providers out-of-the box, no special firmware needed, small, light and nice. Next Post settings.

This post for settings: http://notsoeverydaytechproblems.blogspot.de/2014/02/tl-wr710n-vpn-settings.html