tinc on windowsxp: success :-)

[Jason]

Well, its not a port of tinc to windows, but I am successfully using tinc 
on my Windows XP box at work to allow it to communicate directly with the 
machines on my home LAN (which have private IPs behind NAT).

The problem: no port of tun/tap to windows. so no virtual ethernet driver.
The solution: VMWare Workstation

VMWare comes with a virtual ethernet driver and has a very flexible
virtual networking environment.  Basically you can build virtual switches
and connect to them virtual ethernet cards on the host and also to virtual
ethernet adapters in the guest (vmware emulates complete PCs..).  So I
created a linux virtual machine (VM) with two virtual interfaces: one
bridged to the real ethernet (eth0) with a real internet ip, and the other
(eth1) connected only to a virtual interface on the host.  That virtual
adapter on the host is assigned an IP on my tinc subnet.  On the linux
side, I bring up tinc and then use kernel bridging to bridge the tinc/tun
device with eth1.  The result is that my win box has a new interface that 
sits on my tinc lan.  my router at home is also on that tinc lan so I just 
add a route to my home subnet thru that router at home and bam.. :)

Since I usually keep vmware running anyway, having another VM isn't a big 
deal, especially with vmware 4's UI where each VM is just a tab.  I got 
the linux VM down to only using 12 meg of ram. I could probably take it 
down to 9 or 10 even.

anyway.. for those desperate for a solution now, you can give this a try..

I'd still love a tun/tap port to windows .. or more specifically, a tinc 
port to windows :)  Too bad vmware isn't open source... their virtual 
ethernet driver code would probably be a great start.

Jason


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