Extended Networking Services

The Extended Networking Services (ENS), located at Control Panel > Extended Networking in the WinGate Management console, allows you to configure and manage the advanced networking features of WinGate. These are provided by the network layer ENS driver which is installed by default with WinGate.

Extended Networking Services include:

• Network Address Translation (NAT)

  NAT is a connection method used by clients to reach the Internet through WinGate. It requires little configuration, and no installation of software on the client machine. Clients simply specify the LAN IP address of the WinGate server as their gateway in their network properties, and regardless of the application used by the client, all Internet requests will be sent to the WinGate server.

• Routing

  ENS allows WinGate to act like a router. With ENS, WinGate can route network traffic between different subnets that are connected to any local network interfaces it may have.

• Firewall

  The ENS driver provides a comprehensive and secure firewall to protect both internal LAN users and connections they make to the Internet.

• Port security

  With ENS you can configure security filters to control how WinGate network interfaces should handle traffic through the WinGate firewall. Each filter is based on the interface, the type of connection (TCP or UDP), and what port the traffic is using. Connections that are caught by the port security filter can be set to allow, deny, or redirect the connection to another server if required.

• Monitoring for dead gateways

  The ENS driver can also monitor the connectivity of gateways listed in the properties of any network interface on the WinGate server. If a gateway becomes unresponsive (dead) then WinGate will disable the use of the interface as a possible connection to the Internet by WinGate clients and services.

• Bandwidth Control

  The ENS driver provides bandwidth control to limit the network bandwidth of user connections. Rules can be created to define what type of network traffic that will be affected by a bandwidth restriction. Restrictions can be either a predefined percentage of the available bandwidth, or a specific amount of data.

• IP Blackhole

  With ENS you can blackhole IP addresses that are constantly probing the firewall or causing nuisance traffic to and from WinGate. All IP addresses that are blackholed will be rejected by WinGate whenever they attempt to make a connection to any network interface on the WinGate server.