So, since my last post, we have moved houses. States even. We are now in Greenville, RI, which has made my commute very interesting. I had to buy a car, in fact, just to get to the train. More on that later.
This post is about VPN.
Since I shutdown my PC at the old house, we have not had the VPN running for me and my co-worker. This has made life a living PiTA for us. We, basically, have expensive paperweights on our desks. I have been hard at it to get the new house wired up for Ethernet and, get this, telephone. While working on all of that, I have been correcting runs in the coax cabling, too. But one thing was keeping me stuck. The FiOS router is on one side of the house, say, in the 10 o’clock corner. My PC is in my office, which is at the far corner, the 5 o’clock. I had no issue getting Ethernet and phone to this location, but the FiOS router end of things was making me nuts.
Right now, the Verizon techs just drilled a hole in the floor and crammed the coax cable up it. I wanted to do the job properly: in the wall. Only problem is that I was stuck with having to do this on an exterior wall. It is insulated and I would have to drill a hole in the sill plate. I was not looking forward to this, so I turned to other methods.
Because we are now a FiOS family, I pretty much had to buy the crappy, non-flashable Verizon router. This is a G1100. It is a regular router with like a cable modem built into it. IP addressing all takes place over the coax. It is really a different kind of animal. There is a workaround to get this router to take a backseat role on my LAN, but the docs are sketchy and I am still getting up to speed with FiOS. I’ll leave the G1100 as the primary for now. That left me with a WNDR4500, my parent’s old router, doing nothing. I set to trying to get that configured as a wireless repeater bridge. No joy after two evenings of monkeying with it. I am starting to hate this router. I didn’t want to throw the WNDR4300, the OpenWRT router, at this problem, as I want to leave that in reserve for when I am ready to backseat the G1100. I also still have the WRT54GL, which is loaded with DD-WRT. I found this page describing how to do exactly what I am trying to do: connect the two routers, wirelessly, and provide LAN access to my PC, which does not have a wireless card…and probably never will.
About 45 seconds after the Linky was up and running, I had this thing configured and was pinging the G1100 from my PC! All the things started happening, like Dropbox and updates and web surfing!
I then forwarded the proper ports on the G1100 to my PC’s IP address and tested it with the iPhone. The white whale surfaces!