Looking for nerds who want to nerd: VPN & games

[CmdrFly]

So me & my drinking buddy play games over our LAN religiously. Doom Legacy, Ghost Recon 1, Dawn of War, Mech4: Vengeance, etc. Some of these inherently support hosting Internet games, but work terribly. Some don't support it at all. We want to bring some of our other buddies into the games so that we may frolick happily and murder georgian rebels as a family.

Has anyone tried setting up a spare computer as a local DC (internal systems will be clients on the domain; external systems will not), installing some reliable VPN server on it, and then having external users VPN in and play games over the pseudo-LAN?

I know VPN traffic, depending on the server & packet security settings, is often padded to bloat the packets up to beyond-normal sizes. What I'm unsure of is whether or not this is enough to cause noticable lag in games. I suppose that will depend on the VPN server, but if anyone has experience to share I'd love to hear it.

For reference, game server will be hosted on a very capable gaming rig on Shaw's iConnect (or whatever the fizzle their high-speed consumer service is called, 5 or 10mbps to the modem iirc), and all clients would be connecting on 3mbps broadband from different providers.

 

[CmdrFly]

Alright I'm getting desperate to have a good nerdin' conversation. Anyone have input on how a brother would go about doing this? Best I can figure:

1. build & deploy the DC with a static internal address of 192.168.0.50
2. acquire the external IP's of the external users¹
3. on the gateway router, I enable port forwarding using the above IP addresses to forward to the DC / VPN server²
4. On the VPN server software, I force it to lease a specific IP range to it's own 'DHCP clients' (users establishing the VPN connection), in pool range 192.168.0.51 up to 192.168.0.100 using a 24-bit subnet³
5. Voila...?

¹ = This may prove a problem if our ISPs change their IP's once the DHCP lease expires. Not really sure what to do in that scenario - I don't want to open all traffic to forward to my DC.

² = This should allow my external users to connect to my VPN server by inputting my gateway router's external IP (i.e. my modem's IP) as the source.

³ = This places VPN users on the same subnet as my internal systems, so that the games' UDP broadcasts (showing server name, originator, current usage / map, etc) can reach the VPN users, and allow them to connect





Someone nerd with me, please