DD-WRT, Astrill VPN v2.1 and selective device tunnelling

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drdrake

27 posts

Geek

#105432 4-Jul-2012 13:04

I have a WRT610N router with DD-WRT (192.168.2.1) connected to a DLink ADSL modem (192.168.1.1) over Ethernet. Astrill VPN GUI v2.1 is installed on the router, and I can run all my devices over the VPN through the router just fine. Access to the VPN also works as expected if I connect through the Astrill desktop client from my mac mini (OS X 10.7).

Issue: I want to use the Astrill VPN GUI feature of device filter, so only selected devices use the VPN. I can select the IP address for the mac mini (a static IP), save and connect to the VPN using the DD-WRT web access controls. As expected, all other devices on the network bypass the VPN and have no issues. But, the mac mini that should be using the VPN can only access the router. It can't ping the ADSL modem or connect to the Internet. If I disable the selective device filtering, everything works fine again.

Astrill tech support so far have no ideas, and the ticket has been elevated to 'specialists'. I suspect it could be related to the router and modem being two seperate devices, and that the router is trying to send the device specific traffic direct to the VPN server instead of via the modem. But it's just a random guess.

Has anyone else experienced something similar with DD-WRT and Astrill? Any troubleshooting ideas? Apart from this one issue it's a great combination, and I'd much rather use a GUI based solution than a command line.

drdrake

27 posts

Geek

#653873 11-Jul-2012 09:38

Not that there was any help forthcoming (ok, maybe it was a fairly specific problem), but i have discontinued using the Astrill VPN service - it doesn't work as it is supposed to.

The VPN service itself is good on one computer, and you can change servers as often as you wish. The add-on to the DD-WRT web interface to allow use of the VPN on the router is easy to install and use as well, provided you want everything on the network running through the VPN.

The options to filter VPN use by device or website DO NOT WORK! We isolated the issue to the router after trialling it in two other networks, using a range of Windows 7 and Mac OS X devices. I had several lengthy sessions with Astrill tech support using remote access so they could see the configuration and test/adjust settings themselves, and they could not get their own product to work as advertised.

So if you want to use your DD-WRT router to send just an AppleTV or BluRay player via the VPN to the USA, while everything else in your network is connected directly to your NZ ISP, don't use this service - it will not work.

ferg_nz

175 posts

Master Geek

#653895 11-Jul-2012 10:20

I use the Astrill Service with the filtering on and i have no issues.

the difference i have is that i am running DD-WRT on and x86 device not on the router its self so

Internal devices -> Switch -> DD-WRT (x86) With Astrill -> Telecom supplied Thompson Router.

i only send a couple of devices via the VPN and it works fine. the only issue i have found is if i change some setting on the Access restrictions on DD-WRT (to block Kids Ipods/laptops after certain Hours) i need to disconnect and reconnect the VPN for the Filtered devices to work again.

Maybe the Router does not have enough grunt to do the filtering and this might be the cause. Have you got access to an old pc with 2 network cards that you could try using if you really want to make it work.

Klipspringer

2385 posts

Uber Geek
Inactive user

#653900 11-Jul-2012 10:33

drdrake: The options to filter VPN use by device or website DO NOT WORK! We isolated the issue to the router after trialling it in two other networks, using a range of Windows 7 and Mac OS X devices. I had several lengthy sessions with Astrill tech support using remote access so they could see the configuration and test/adjust settings themselves, and they could not get their own product to work as advertised.

So if you want to use your DD-WRT router to send just an AppleTV or BluRay player via the VPN to the USA, while everything else in your network is connected directly to your NZ ISP, don't use this service - it will not work.

I agree. I struggled to get filtering to work. And it seems to be a problem with the latest Astril DD-WRT software. I never had issues previously.

But in the end I did get it to work. Problem is that if you have other dhcp servers on your network, the DD-WRT somehow does not see all devices on the network. Here is what I did to get it working. If a device on your network obtains an IP from another dhcp server you can forget about seeing in in the filter list.

- Disable all dhcp servers on your network and switch on dhcp on the DD-WRT router only.
- Setup dhcp on the wrt router, assign static IP addresses to all mac addresses on your network for the devices you want to filter.
- reboot the DD-WRT router, once done reboot all the devices on your network. Make sure they obtained the correct dhcp assigned IP's.
- Only then will the devices be available to filter.
- The option to only allow a certain IP to use the vpn does not work. But the option to disalow certain IP's from using the vpn does. Filter all devieces that you DO NOT want to use the vpn.

I have done the above. Set up all my devices not to use the vpn except for the playstation. Any new device that is added onto the network automatically uses the vpn.

If that does not work, maybe try rolling back to the previous Astril DD-WRT release. V1