routing from one interface to another in windows 11

Question

routing from one interface to another in windows 11

Billy Moon 0

I setup a tunnel between a Mac and a Windows 11 box. The windows machine has one network on the tun interface it also has a different network on its wifi interface. I send a "ping" packet via the tunnel connected to the tun interface. The ping packet arrives at the windows 11 machine. Its destination is the WiFi interface's IP address. The ping packet (ICMP Pingv4) is dropped. I have tried:

disabling firewall
adding an advanced firewall rule to enable ICMPv4
netsh interface ipv4 set interface tun forwding=enabled on both the tun and the wifi cards --> with this set on the tun interface I can ping its address from the remote machine but not the wifi address. With this set on both interfaces, I can't ping either interface from the remote machine. In all cases the packets arrive and are dropped
I have tried turning on the very basic "remote access and routing" functionality

Note this is quite simple on a mac or on a linux box. You just have to turn on ipv4 or ipv6 routing and you're done. Works great. Simple cli command. I simply can't find a combination of cli commands to enable this on a windows 11 laptop. I'm far from an expert on windows or windows network. I am a 40+ year veteran networking software engineer. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated!

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Answer 1

Geoff McKenzie 865

Hi Bill,

I haven't tried this on windows 10/11, personally, however, have you looked at this article?

https://umatechnology.org/how-to-enable-ip-routing-windows-11/#google_vignette

It looks like there are some additional steps after turning on RRAS. Personally I would use a server edition for routing (or something meant for routing like an opensense/pfsense VM).

Here are some other possible Options - again I haven't tried any of them on Windows 10/11....

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/ipenablerouter/c35cc4ba-a7d7-4b46-80a1-4379829236bd

https://serverfault.com/questions/929081/how-can-i-enable-packet-forwarding-on-windows

https://support.tetcos.com/support/solutions/articles/14000098272-how-to-enable-ip-forwarding-in-windows-for-emulation-using-netsim-

https://serverfault.com/questions/1164386/why-is-the-windows-routing-registry-value-ipenablerouter-1-no-longer-working

https://www.elevenforum.com/t/routing-through-win-11.4581/

It has been a long time since I had windows 'acting' as a router. I have used internet connection sharing and the registry hack but neither since about windows xp timeline.

HTH

Billy Moon 0 Reputation points

2025-04-15T18:10:01.49+00:00

First suggested link doesn't work. There is no longer a "global" forwarding property to set. You can set forwarding on a given interface. I've tried setting this on each link, one at a time. With it set on my Tun interface, I can "ping" that interface only. If I try to ping another interface on the windows machine, I see the packet coming into the windows machine, but no reply. If I add "forwarding=enabled" to the other interface, then I can't ping either interface -- neither the Tun interface nor the other interface.

If I turn on "Remote Access and Routing" and start the service, then I can't ping any interfaces.

I have added firewall rules to enable icmpv4 and v6 and I have disabled the firewall all together for all profiles.

Second article I have followed as well. I added the key to the register, enabled RAR and restarted computer. No joy. Won't forward packets between interfaces.

Third article is just the same as second, but using power shell commands. Still no joy.

Fourth article is a good article, which I have read before, but still doesn't work. It just shows how to add the key using regedit and then start up RAR.

Fifth article says to do what I described above. Enable forwarding on each interface rather than using the global registry variable. Again, no joy.

Sixth article avoids the question and answers how to "share" a lan connection (NAT/PAT wise.) Not applicable to the problem at hand.

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routing from one interface to another in windows 11

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