Tunneling internet traffic through VPN on a home router

Question

I want to tunnel some of my internet traffic through home VPN for security. What do I need to do to achieve it?

My laptop runs Windows7, the router I have is Netgear WNDR3700v2 with a stock firmware.

I'm happy to change router firmware to some 3d party one if that would be required.

Solution 1

You need a VPN endpoint. That could be a PC at home or a router. It doesn't appear that your router supports it directly. Using DD-WRT will allow for this. The whole process is rather complicated so the references are listed below.

The docs for install are here: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Netgear_WNDR3700 and the docs for using OpenVPN with it are here: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/OpenVPN.

Solution 2

With regards to your side question, yes, it's easy to send only certain sites through the vpn, but it is done by IP address, not by domain name. So it won't work very well for sites with frequently changing IPs (rare) or a DNS round robin when not all IPs in the round robin are known (somewhat rare).

For a website to tunnel through the VPN, it's IP address (or subnet) needs to have an entry in the routing table on the client computer. That can be added manually on the client computer or it can be pushed to the client from the VPN server at connection time.

The manual way, for Windows, is as follows from the command prompt:

route add 123.123.123.123 MASK 255.255.255.255 gateway 10.0.0.1

where 123.123.123.123 is the IP address of the website, and 10.0.0.1 is the gateway IP on the VPN setup (possibly the LAN-side IP of your router, depending on how the VPN is configured).

To push the routes automatically, add the following line to the end of the OpenVPN config file on the server:

push "route 123.123.123.123 255.255.255.255";

again, where 123.123.123.123 is the IP address of the site. Note that in this case, OpenVPN will automatically handle putting the right gateway in.

Comments

[alexeit]

A side question - it is possible to setup that only certain sites go throw the vpn and the rest go through directly, isnt it?