OpenVPN is now my friend.
On Friday, Sinc asked me if I would help him set up OpenVPN for his home network. I went through the process of helping him, and got it up and running. Then, he asked me to make his VPN a “bridged” VPN, where connecting clients would become literally a part of his home network instead of having their own somewhat separated network (like I do for my own VPN). After going through a bit of trouble to do so, I discovered his purpose in putting it together: gaming!
You see, we’d play strategy games like Command & Conquer Generals and Warcraft III more often, but we end up having to deal with severe firewall issues. I figured out how to get Generals working with my own WRT54G router, but we could never get it going with Sinc’s and Kanan’s firewalls. Using OpenVPN, we can now play games under a LAN configuration. We ended up playing several games of Generals this past weekend, and the performance was much better than we had expected.
Now that we know we can do that, we can send the OpenVPN configuration files to Kanan, Worff (if he feels like playing), and Missy (ditto) so we can get nice big games going. :-)
I will say this… playing RTS games like Generals is much more fun when you’re playing cooperatively with your friends against the CPU instead of fighting each other. :-)
Anyway, I’ll have a non-geeky post up later today… got work I need to do now. Heh.