VLAN\VPN discussion thread - aka "why hamachi sucks"

[JimmerSnail]

I wanted to make an "help me" kind of thread, but instead I'd like to talk about a topic which is now criminally underappreciated: Virtual Lan, better known as VLAN (or Lan VPNs, or just "VPNs").
Nowadays when one talks about a VPN it's usually referring to the likes of Tor (which is a proxy) or NordVPN (which was hacked), or ProtonVPN and all the singing band, but there's also another side of the matter which nowadays is almost never discussed, but it was quite a bit of a talking point back when Tunngle was a thing.

What I'm referring to is the ability to port forward games that supports LAN (or don't, in the case of Tunngle), for example Minecraft, and I need to use this as an example since it's probably the one that's the easiest to explain.
I'm not too knowledgeable on the subject, so I hope you will excuse my poorly explanations. I will update this message whenever I get some better info.

Anyway, a quick example would be:
Pretend it's 2010 and you're young Timmy Rogers and want to host a Minecraft server for to play with your friend Dick Alan. You can of course join by just starting up the mc_server.jar (if you had an IQ higher than 2), and then starting up the game and joining at the ip "localhost" or "127.0.0.1" (with or without a port).
But of course your friend Dick wouldn't be able to join because both IPs are internal names and yadda yadda. You, Timmy, don't know what the hell a port-forward is, nor how to do it; or maybe you do know but your router doesn't let you do it or there are other problems.
What you needed was a program like Tunngle (~2011 - 2018 ) or Hamachi, but for this example we'll go with Hamachi. You download that thing, and installed everything it requires (usually a virtual lan adapter - AKA: 'VLAN'), then start it up, press the program's power button, create a network, and your friend Dick joins the network. After which you go into the server-properties file and change the ip line from "'0.0.0.0" to whatever your hamachi's IPv4 was, for example "217.533.901.001".
Now your friend can finally join in and you'll have the most autistic time of your life.

Here's a sitrep of VLAN\VPNs situation from 2017 to 2019:
• Hamachi is now a shithole and doesn't work half the time, besides, it became slower resulting in games where the lowest ping was 250 ms;
• It's 'alternatives' either don't work (radmin vpn, really it need more luck than knowledge) or require a being an I.T. (zerotier), and either way are too much of an hassle to use despite their promises of being "user friendly\ease of use", more on that later.
• Tunngle closed due to 'gdpr', meaning that they were either selling users' data or they just wanted an excuse to shut it down;
• EvolveHQ, which was a great alternative to the two previously mentioned programs is now down because their developers, echobit, being idiots and instead of looking for partners\ads they were lazily hoping that their users would pay the bills with a premium feature which gave nothing if not a slightly better voice chat and IP that don't change in their networking system

Spoiler: semi-rant

besides, it was also very intensive on lower end pcs. Also they've closed another program called 'lanbridger' before for the same reason, and tried to capitalize on the lack of semi-decent VLAN making a subscription-based program's kickstarter called "bowstring", which failed miserably because of their shitty pricing. (40$ a month? for something I'd use twice a year? fuck off).
Also, why didn't those player.me tried to also integrate evolve's party system into their shitty program? what good can a program that's a raptr wannabe do? "but it tracks your game stats",because that's a selling point now.

• Softether VPN is just a VPN, not a vlan, it can work as vlan only if you're there changing stuff you're not supposed to.
• Gameranger only works on few specified games (so no doom, no quake, no goldsrc games...)
• There's another program which is trying to copy it, called "rankedgaming", but it only works for Warcraft 3.
• Garena\Garena+ became a discord wannabe and deleted the option of hosting games, they made an external program called "Garena Lan Games", but it doesn't work anymore.

I wanted to share this with you, because it seems that there's an ever decreasing interest into keeping old games alive. I know that 3/4 of the user base of these programs are either pirates or oldfags which also learnt how to port forward games, but still, it was nice when there was the option of quickly hosting a quake game without the need of depending some from chinese potato server or opening the ports (especially since it's not really an option sometimes).

 

[3119967d0c]

What do you see as the problem with ZeroTier? I haven't used it for gaming, but as far as use on Windows in general, my primary issues there have been related to firewall rules (which you should be able to take care of by whitelisting what you're using on there), or Windows getting confused about what the primary network connection is when you are connecting over a wireless connection and have ZeroTier and another VPN connection or three that you regularly take up and down (a Windows networking problem not a ZeroTier one, resolvable by disabling and enabling the wireless connection).

 

[JimmerSnail]

What do you see as the problem with ZeroTier? I haven't used it for gaming, but as far as use on Windows, my primary issues there have been related to firewall rules (which you should be able to take care of by whitelisting what you're using on there), or Windows getting confused about what the primary network connection is when you are connecting over a wireless connection and have ZeroTier and another VPN connection or three that you regularly take up and down (a Windows networking problem not a ZeroTier one, resolvable by disabling and enabling the wireless connection).

Annoying to set up, also didn't worked for games. I'd like to host a terraria server through tshock and even I can't join. Surely there's something that I have messed up, but saying "it's really easy to use" while most of the time you need to do stuff in terminal doesn't really spells "ease of use" to me.
What I want is that the program does it's thing almost automatically, like Evolve, Hamachi, Tunngle (and supposedly Radmin 'VPN') did back in the day. Especially because having to explain how to setup the client it's often annoying when people you're explaing it to don't know the difference between Terminal and Command Prompt.

 

[Coffee Shits]

I used Hamachi back in the day. Started it up right next to Xfire.

In my experience, it worked decently, depending on the game. My experience with playing multiplayer shooters over it was that if your friends were geographically close (2-6 hops) with the broadband of the day you'd have minimal moments of "I shot you in the FACE why aren't you DEAD" followed by getting blasted by a guy who teleported in from around the corner.

Pretend it's 2010 and you're young Timmy Rogers and want to host a Minecraft server for to play with your friend Dick Alan. You can of course join by just starting up the mc_server.jar (if you had an IQ higher than 2), and then starting up the game and joining at the ip "localhost" or "127.0.0.1" (with or without a port).
But of course your friend Dick wouldn't be able to join because both IPs are internal names and yadda yadda. You, Timmy, don't know what the hell a port-forward is, nor how to do it; or maybe you do know but your router doesn't let you do it or there are other problems.
What you needed was a program like Tunngle (~2011 - 2018 ) or Hamachi, but for this example we'll go with Hamachi. You download that thing, and installed everything it requires (usually a virtual lan adapter - AKA: 'VLAN'), then start it up, press the program's power button, create a network, and your friend Dick joins the network. After which you go into the server-properties file and change the ip line from "'0.0.0.0" to whatever your hamachi's IPv4 was, for example "217.533.901.001".
Now your friend can finally join in and you'll have the most autistic time of your life.

I found that even with the friendly UI, punching in IPs and having alternate network adapters was just too much for my friends when we used it. They weren't techies, but I struggled to see even back then why we were always held up for the same two or three people who were paralyzed by the complexity. I've seen recently games that remove the direct IP connection option, and I think it's for the same reason.

 

[JimmerSnail]

I just recalled that Wippien was a thing, but I doubt anyone would use it anymore, since it aged like milk.
To use it you need first to create a login on some xmpp, like this one, then you need to close it and reopen it as admin (do this at least once). And then I don't know how well it works, and if it works.

Edit: someone also suggested me Playhide. Does anyone know if that's any good?