How on earth do you share a VPN connection over WiFi?

[Zachary Roberts]

My computer is connected to a VPN (Torguard) and I wish to enable internet sharing over WiFi to connect on my other devices, specifically on an Xbox One which doesn't have any facility to configure a VPN connection on the device itself. My reasons for doing this are I have issues with my internet service provider having a hissy fit every time I connect to Xbox Live and throttling my otherwise speedy connection to a ridiculous 50kbps. I have proved that the throttling issue is resolved on all my other devices when I route all traffic through the VPN so I'd now like to get my Xbox to connect to my VPNed internet which is proving virtually impossible for me to do. The only way I can see it working is to share my computer's VPNed internet connection. However, every time I enable internet sharing for this it reports back "No internet access". I can connect to the WiFi HostedNetwork/Adhoc network ok but I can't for the life of me get internet to work! Internet/VPNed internet is working fine on the computer but it refuses to work on sharing.

 

[bill001g]

You best bet is to try to load the VPN on your router.

First the VPN provider must not have intentionally tried to prevent this. Many VPN software either go down if you try to modify the network settings or they are just not compatible with some of the sharing methods. The first to try is ICS which is built in to the OS, microsoft has good instructions. You may also need a hotspot software if you can not get adhoc to work. The other option is to buy a commercial software like connectify to solve this issue.

I would see if your router support dd-wrt or one of the other third party firmwares that has openvpn pre installed.

 

[Zachary Roberts]

I found the solution. For future reference everybody who tries to enable internet sharing over HostedNetwork and finds it doesn't have any internet connection try setting Routing and Remote Access service (in services.msc) to "Automatic". It was disabled by default for me. Then stop and start your hosted network using the following commands:

netsh wlan stop hostednetwork
netsh wlan start hostednetwork

Make sure you run cmd.exe as an administrator to run the above commands. Good luck! Microsoft said nothing about this in their official documentation but @MicrosoftHelps told me to try this method on Twitter. I recommended they include the above in their documentation because they really need to learn how to speak English lol! Their documentation isn't exactly ABC and if you're stuck on something the last thing you want is more hassle.