Hi. Excellent product this NeoRouter. Just been tinkering with it today.

I have a network at home of a few PCs and a large capacity file server. My mum lives a fair distance away and I've used a RaspberryPi as an OpenSwan L2TP VPN server to connect her to my home network for backups and remote access..

This is very slow indeed. Even copying files from my file server to her laptop takes an age - and my connect is fibre broadband. I've concluded that the Pi is probably the bottleneck.

So I plan to replace this with NeoRouter. I've experimented with having the NR server running directly on my fileserver, and it's much faster.. But I'd like the connections to be as transparent to my mum as possible.. So if the file server is switched off when she logs on for what ever reason, the NR client on her machine doesn't log on, even if the file server is switched on later.

I figure since my RaspberryPi is on all the time, it could act as the server for NeoRouter.. I read that connections were made peer to peer between the machines on the VPN... My question is, does this mean will using the Pi as an NR Server slow things down? By rights, as I understand it, it shouldn't should it?

Anyone have any idea?

Thanks. Paul.

Hi Paul,

I think your understanding is correct. I believe NR can establish P2P connection between the peers, so using Rpi as a server won't slow down the speed. In most cases, especially home routers, NR clients can easily create P2P connection. The only case it uses NR server as relay server is both peers (NR clients) are behind Symmetric NAT.

Thanks,
KevinZ - NeoRouter team

I'm using TCP View to monitor the connections between the networks right now..

There's a tiny bit UDP activity in the NRService.exe application.. But the main bulk is a TCP connection.. It's maxxed out at around 312kilobytes a second..

Does this seem like the Pi is being used a relay to you?

If so, what can I do my the routers on both sites to allow UDP P2P to work more effectively?

Thanks!

Also, I didn't change any firewall settings on the RaspberryPi server.. It just kinda "worked" - I assumed everything would be fine regards that.

Also, windows remote desktop works with UDP and very quickly indeed.

What this all means, I do not know. haha.

Can anyone explain what is happening in the attached screenshot.. This is copying a file from "shirley-laptop" to "server-pc" which is across the internet.

There are UDP and TCP connections.. But I dont really know whats going on

Hi mr_greedy,

Your screenshot is a good example.

NRService.exe to remote 32976/tcp is a connection between NR client and NR server. Each NR client must have a tcp connection to NR server.

The first line , NRService.exe UDP connection is a P2P connection to a remote peer. It means that your peers successfully established UDP P2P connection and all traffic go though this tunnel instead of the tcp one to the NR server. It may create a connection to each peer of your remote computers when need.

If that box failed to establish P2P connection to peer, you won't see the UDP connection and all traffic will be relayed by NR server using the tcp tunnel.


Thanks,
KevinZ - NeoRouter team