Setting it up
Winroute runs on a PC connected to the internet, even with a cheapo 56k modem like mine. The only other bit of hardware you need on the Winroute machine is a standard NIC. It will run almost as happily on Win 98 as it will on NT, which is quite handy in terms of overhead and setting up.For the review I set up two machines. Machine 1 had Winroute installed on a P3 Windows 98 machine, and machine 2, the ‘client’, being a K6 Windows NT Small Business Server 4.5. This may seem an odd way round to do things, but it ensures that I get the full benefit of the firewall as any incoming data would have to go over the LAN, so there is no way for NT to make direct connection to the net.
The program is very small and sits in the taskbar unobtrusively when not being tweaked. Installation is a breeze, and the server side can be set up for most standard operations within about 3 minutes. There are a number of advanced features which I disabled, like DHCP server, mail server, and proxy server. The first two of these are probably of not much use to home users, and the third defeats the point of this review. The only thing I have needed to set up a port mapping for was for my www server to the NT client. This is because calls to it were getting firewalled otherwise, which is how it should be. To connect clients to the router, all you have to do is got to the network properties control panel, and point the TCP/IP default gateway to the IP address of the machine with Winroute on it. NO PORT MAPPINGS REQUIRED. I keep emphasising this, but unless you have used proxy servers a lot you don’t know how much of a pain in the arse all that setting up can be.