Welcome to ITFreeTraining's next video in the series on building your own home network.
In the previous videos I looked at creating a virtual network and a virtual router to
connect the virtual network to your local physical network- all possible using standard
home DSL equipment and a computer running virtualization software. In this video I will
look at adding a route to the home DSL router in order to allow a computer connected to
the local network to access the virtual network. To get started, I will now change to my desktop
computer connected directly to the local network.
To demonstrate the problem a bit better, I will open a command prompt and ping the IP
address of NYDC1. You will notice that I get a message stating the destination network
is unreachable. Notice also the IP Address starts with 10. IP Addresses starting with
10 are not in use on my local network. What has happened is the packets from the ping
command have been routed out the internet connection and to my ISP. The ISP's internal
network does not know how to route these so it is not uncommon to get a response back
from a 10 address like this. If the ISP has an internal outage like a single router failure
or routing issue you may get a response back like this one. The reason is 10 addresses
like these are used by the internal ISP network to router traffic around. One of the internal
ISP routers that has been given a 10 address has responded back stating it does not know
how to route this traffic.
I will now open up internet explorer and open the management address of my home DSL router.
Once I have entered in the username and password I will be taken into the management interface.
Unless you have the same device as me, your interface will most likely be different. On
this device, if I select advanced setup, to add routes I need to go down to Routing and
then select the option static route.
I will now add a static route. The destination address I will use is 192.168.0.0/16. This
will effectively route all traffic for any address starting with 192.168 to the IP Address
I am about to enter.
This router is configured with the local IP address 192.168.0.1. Any data for the network
192.168.0.0, since it is directly connected to the router, will be correctly routed. The
additional route that I am adding will only be used for my internal virtual network that
is connected by this router. That is networks that start if 192.168.1 and above.
Next I need to configure the interface that this route will send traffic out of, in this
case the local network adapter rather than the wan interface, and then enter in the gateway
IP address. The gateway IP is the IP address of the network interface of my virtual router
connected to the local physical network.
Lastly I will enter in 1 for the metric. If there are multiple routes, the available route
with the lowest metric will be used. Once I press apply the route will be added.
With the route added, traffic for my virtual network will now be routed correctly from
my local computer. If I now close internet explorer you will notice the ping command
is now getting a response back from NYDC1.
That is it for the configuration of the router, if you are confused about what has happened
I will now go through a graphical recap of what has happened in the video. If you understand
what has happened in this video so far, you can end the video here and I hope to see you
in other videos from us.
On this network I have a number of virtual machines that are connected to a virtual router.
This virtual router is connected to my DSL device which is connected to the internet.
This setup will work fine in most cases. The problem occurs when a desktop is added to
the local network. The desktop gateway will be configured to the DSL device and thus when
it attempts to contact a virtual server, the traffic will be routed to the internet. When
it reaches the internet, since the destination data is an internal network, the routers on
the internet will not know what to do with the data and effectively the data will be
dropped.
In order to fix this problem, a route is added to the DSL router telling the router to route
any traffic from the local networks to the virtual router rather than the internet. Now
when data from the local network is sent to the virtual server, it will instead be routed
correctly rather than routed to the internet.
If you do not plan to access any computers on the virtual networks from the local physical
network you will not need to add this route. However, if you do plan to, for example you
may plan to use remote control tools like Remote Desktop to access these servers, you
will need to add this route.
This has been another free video from ITFreeTraining, part of building your own home network and
virtual machines video series. For more free videos on building your own home systems as
well as videos on other topics including certification, please have a look at our web page or our
YouTube channel. Thanks for watching and see you next time.