hi, my friends are wanting to use a VPN for LAN gaming from our homes. We've tried hamachi and it seemed to work ok with unreal tournament 3 but i was wondering if it would be better to use openvpn as the server would be on someones network rather than out in the ether. has anyone had any experience? i have setup openvpn to do bridged routing so it will allow us to play old games, browse the network by netbios name etc so there shouldn't be any sort of connectivity problems it's really just the performance that i was wondering about cheers
The trick with Hamachi is that it's servers are only used in several occasions The server is used to establish a peer to peer connection between the users in the network. If the connection couldn't get established then a server acts as a relay giving lower performance and higher latencies. So I don't think you would get any increase in performance by having your own VPN server.
I've used hamachi for titan quest with some friends local.. it works pretty good for gaming- used kali and another one that was free.. can't remember the name offhand hamachi is just easier than vpn when you have a friend with the downs edit* this was it, kahn http://www.descent2.com/kahn/ played alot of starcraft on there back in the day =] dunno if anyone runs any servers anymore
Me and my friends managed to play CS over Hamachi considering that in my country internet connections really suck. You can't get very high speeds (specially upload), and most of the friends were relayed over the Hamachi servers. @ Dark_Master_Dragon Google is your friend Wikipedia - Hamachi Hamachi homepage
Hamachi all the way tbh, a LOT easier to setup and use than openVPN. Hamachi is also cross platform and free much like openVPN. with openVPN everyone connects to a central server where all the trafic is relayed, where as with hamachi, it works like P2P, you connect to a central server to login and initiate direct connections between you and your friends, so you should also get better performance as your not sending to a central and and re sending the data from that server. Use it for playing a number of games... Starcraft (using UDP) Red Alert 2 (using IPX) Swat4 Company Of Heroes Dawn Of War C&C series Vietcong Unreal Tournament series Doom 3 co-op mod Sins Of A Solar Empire Soldier Of Fortune 2 with Goldrush WarCraft 3... just to name a few. Also checkout a handy setup guide I made previously here. NOTE: to get IPX to work with hamachi you need to tweak the ipx settings for both your local and hamachi adaptors, if this is something your likely do then ill quickly thorw a guide together.
well, i got openVPN working without any difficulty really and running a ping test revealed average pings of about 23ms which is not bad although there were a couple of dropped packets. however how that translates into actually playing games with a few folk i don't know. the reason i'd thought about options other than hamachi was that i couldn't get hamachi to work! wouldn't connect to server. i ended up removing stuff from the registry etc to get it to work. after that i then had the thought it might have been that utorrent was running! of course with openvpn on the server means that multiple pcs on my lan could be connected with a remote machine without having to do anything on them... also means it could be used for xbox system link games perhaps