I had hoped this would be straightforward and a common thing amongst gamers.
I have looked as SoftEther and while it might do what I want it suffers from poor or out of date information where the simplest solutions is two Bridge Applications. It also requires Ethernet Adapters and doesn't seem to work for WiFi adapters.
I've looked at numerous Open Source applications and most seem to be for Linux. The other issue is that I get many VPN hits for proxy users trying to hide their IP.
So, is there a simple means of simply joining two networks, separated by a WAN and some miles, so they look a single network?
Arguably wifi is less good for gaming anyway (you tend to get spikes of high latency when there is any congestion on the wifi)
I do it using business class routers that have "LAN to LAN" VPN capabilities built in. You setup a VPN entry on each that points at the other, and make the connection bi-directional so that either end can bring up the connection. Whenever a system tries to access a resource at the other site, the router will bring up the VPN. You can configure how long it keeps it up (it can be "nailed up" permanently if you want, or automatically close after a period of inactivity)
You could pick up a pair of Draytek 2830's from ebay for peanuts now... Those will handle ADSL2+ on their internal WAN, any ethernet presented WAN, or a USB 3/4G dongle for a mobile connected WAN.
The type of VPN you want is called a "site to site VPN" as opposed to the more common "remote access VPN" that most people mean when they say "VPN".
This could be done with an IPsec VPN. Most IPsec solutions will look like a routed point-to-point link (similar to what you'd see if you had a router at each end connected by a leased line). I think it's also possible to have a bridged connection with an IPsec VPN so the two sites look like they are connected by a bridge and are in the same collision domain.
If you don't want to mess around with Linux IPsec software like strongswan you could use pfSense which provides a GUI interface.
There's roughly two options. One is the site-to-site VPN suggested, where you have two VPN-capable routers at each end, and open ports so they can see each other. That doesn't work if the end(s) are behind a firewall or CGNAT (for example, on a 4G connection) such that peer-to-peer connectivity doesn't work.
The other uses a central server, which is set up so that clients can talk to each other (usually VPNs are configured not to do that). I've done that with OpenVPN, for example. The clients 'dial up' the server, which connects them to the VPN and they can then see the other machines that are currently connected. If you don't want to run your own server you'd need to find a provider that offers this - I don't have any suggestions I'm afraid.
Many other providers also offer VPSes - ballpark is roughly $2 to $20 a month (AWS is quite pricey). But the OP said they didn't want things for Linux, and so setting up their own VPN server (and maintaining it and keeping it secure) doesn't sound like a project that's top of their list...
My AWS VPS is costing me between $5 and $10 a month (not often as much as $10). And that includes cranking it up to a more powerful CPU once or twice a month.
Yup for data shifting it will be fine. Just for real time games you can see spikes of latency top 100 ms when there are other users on the wifi, and that can be enough to mess up a game.
The fibre will terminate into a Optical Network Terminal, and that presents the data over ethernet.
You need to connect that to a router that understands how to initiate a PPPoE (Point to Point Protocol over Ethernet). So configuration on the Draytek routers is trivial; plug the ONT into the WAN2 port on the router, and then setup the WAN2 connection on the router to do PPPoE, give it a user name and password, and you are all set.
Now 2830s are very capable, but being a bit older don't have masses of throughput (they were designed in the era of ADSL, ADSL2+, and early implementations of VDSL (i.e. FTTC)). So they will happily load balance a pair of ADSL2+ WAN connections, or do a 80Mbps FTTC connection with failover to ADSL2, but they will run out of puff at about 100 Mbps total throughput between the LAN and WAN sides. Usually plenty for shifting files about, but might not be as quick as your fibre.
a 2860 or 2862 will cost a bit more second hand, but will do north of
400 Mbps and also have hardware accelerated VPN processing.
Once you have a LAN to LAN VPN in place, then you can access resources on the "other" LAN as if they were local - that can include shared folders and printers, RDP or whatever else you like. You can elect to have netbios name sharing as well if you want, so you can access hosts on the other lan by name rather than just IP.
With a lan to lan VPN it is usually easier you have both on different subnets, say one on 192.168.10.n and the other on 192.168.11.n
That way each router can handle its own network DHCP and you don't need to worry about either synchronising them to avoid address conflicts, or carefully setting DHCP base and limits such that there is no possibility that they could overlap.
Such things exist but then need hardware to run on and quite a bit more configuration to get working. Picking the wrong hardware can also swallow up any savings in power consumption.
The 2860 is fairly substantial upgrade on the old 2830s, and as you say, still supported. (I found a bug in wifi handling when using an external RADIUS server for authentication that affected a bunch of models. They fixed it in the 2860's and later but refused to do a fix for the 2830 range which was annoying!)
Note if using the internal modem you can get different firmware for those depending on how conservative you want it to be. There is one designed for "long lines" that will opt for stability rather than maximum speed. (you can also tweak the desired s/n ratios from the command line).
I've had a 2860 for years. Discovered a couple of nasty bugs early on, but they fixed them quickly when I reported them.
One was that they'd added a firewall (I turned it off because it wasn't very configurable and my firewall was immediately downstream). Unfortunately, 'off' was merely a relatve term. It still blocked outgoing DNS traffix; since I run a hidden primary for several domains, all my zone transfers failed. It took use of my ISP's packet tracing facility to find that one. There was also a problem with IPv6.
They have a hosted cloud service VPN which is not free. They have something called Access Server which is company VPN management, not free.
And they have a community edition, which is ...
formatting link
You will need to be comfortable with Linux command line and networking terminology, or willing to study. No setup.exe herem, but a good HOWTO.
Works well though, I have it on a Raspberry Pi 3B which works fine for basic incoming Remote Desktop sessions. However, multiple sessions will probably need a bit more grunt.
I now have 2 Draytek routers at each site and can see all of the machines once I followed a set of instructions for a LAN to LAN VPN.
I did have to poke around in a couple of PCs firewall to make the remote subnet visible. AngryIP scanner got a lot of use to check overall visibility.
Thanks for the help supplied.
My only annoyance is that a machine is discoverable in File Explorer but the shared directories below aren't visible. Yet if I use the IP address directly I can.
Your client PC on local subnet probably can't locate the master browser (and hence the server PC on the remote subnet. If the PCs are on static IPs you could try manually adding them to the lmhosts file on the client for a starter ...
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.