When we arrived in hotel I asked for Wi-Fi access. They asked me for how many devices and I said that for 6 devices. After a while I received 6 tickets with 6 username/password… all different. I went to my room where I started connecting all devices to the hotel WiFi…

My phone and laptop connected without any problems, my wife phone couldn’t connect at all… in that moment I decided to check if is possible to share laptop internet with other devices and I found this simple, but powerful application… Connectify Hotspot … I instaled it, run it and in a few simple steps I configured it…

After that, I connected all my devices to Wolfy-AP and everything works without problems. And the best thing off all… when I moved to the next hotel I asked only 1 ticket for WiFi, connected my laptop on hotel WiFi and without any other configuration all my other devices had internet connection, because they were already connected to my Wolfy-AP!

I could write all features that comes with this great app, but I think that if you find that app useful, you will go on there homepage and get all information there…

I bought  Hotspot MAX version, witch have all features, but they have other version…

The free version is good enough for travelers, but when you see how many problems go away with this app, you will probably decided to buy a licence just for support the developers even if you don’t need any other features :)

For aditional info go to www.connectify.me.

Do you already use connectify hotspot? Share your opinion with a comment :)

Before I started to wrote this post, I thought that would be nice to say some word about PPTP VPN and Mikrotik RouterOS, but then I realized that if you are reading this, there is no need to explain what is PPTP VPN server or Mikrotik RouterOS.

Here is a simple step by step tutorial with images and all information that you need to get a fully working PPTP VPN server…

Step 1: create VPN pool

IP pools are used to define range of IP addresses that will be used for your PPTP VPN server

[admin@MikroTik] > /ip pool print
 NAME      RANGES
 VPN-pool  192.168.1.101-192.168.1.110

Step 2: create a VPN user

In this step you will create a user that can connect to your VPN Server. In this example only one user is created, but you can add as many user as you need…

[admin@MikroTik] > /ppp secret print
 # NAME SERVICE CALLER-ID PASSWORD PROFILE     REMOTE-ADDRESS
 0 ppp1 pptp    ppp1      ****     VPN-profile

Step 3: create a VPN profile

From wiki.mikrotik.com

PPP profiles are used to define default values for user access records stored under /ppp secret submenu. Settings in /ppp secret User Database override corresponding /ppp profile settings except that single IP addresses always take precedence over IP pools when specified as local-address or remote-address parameters.

[admin@MikroTik] > /ppp profile print
 1    name="VPN-profile" local-address=192.168.1.1 remote-address=VPN-pool bridge=br1 use-mpls=default
      use-compression=default use-vj-compression=default use-encryption=yes only-one=default
      change-tcp-mss=yes address-list="" dns-server=8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4

Step 4: Create PPTP Server Binding (Optional)

This step is optional, because your VPN server will work even if you skip this.

In this step you bind user ppp1 to interface pptp-in1. This is very useful if you need to create firewall rules for a specific user.

Step 5: Enable VPN Server

In this step we just need to enable our PPTP server and set default profile…

[admin@MikroTik] > /interface pptp-server server print
           enabled: yes
           max-mtu: 1450
           max-mru: 1450
              mrru: 1600
    authentication: mschap1,mschap2
 keepalive-timeout: 30
   default-profile: VPN-profile

Step 6: Configure bridge (Optional)

Like step 4, even this step is optional. This step is the main reason that I’m writing this tutorial, so it deserves a few word :)

If you skip this step, you will be able to connect to your VPN server, you will have the same public IP as your VPN server, but you will not see any other devices connected on this subnet. If this is OK for you, you don’t need to do anything else.

If you want to see other devices in your subnet, you must change ARP mode for your Bridge. For more details about ARP modes go to mikrotik documentation

[admin@MikroTik] > /interface bridge print
Flags: X - disabled, R - running
  0    R name="br1" mtu=1500 l2mtu=1598 arp=proxy-arp mac-address=4C:5E:0C:21:A4:85 protocol-mode=rstp
         priority=0x8000 auto-mac=no admin-mac=4C:5E:0C:21:A4:85 max-message-age=20s forward-delay=15s
         transmit-hold-count=6 ageing-time=5m

Step 7: Finish

If you did all right, you now have a working PPTP VPN server.

Important: Don’t forget to open port 1723 (tcp) in your firewall settings:

/ip firewall filter add chain=input comment="PPTP VPN" dst-port=1723 protocol=tcp

If you need any help or I did something wrong, leave a comment and I will try to do my best to help you.