EH-Net

Hi! I'm new here, so I hope I'm posting this in the right section.

I'm wanting to know if it's possible to hide or otherwise redirect my IP address for a specific application. It's a long story of drama as to why I wish to do this so I won't bore you unless asked for details, but this is for no illegal purposes. Basically I don't want my IP address available to members of an IRC network of people I chat with, but I don't want to have to go through an online host.  I'd rather use X-Chat or mIRC as these programs are familiar to me and easy to use.

I'm getting conflicting information in my research on this topic and I have found a few websites (paid, of course) that claim to be able to use a VPN to redirect my IP address for any application that connects to the internet. If I had my own VPN set up could I do this myself?

Thanks, and sorry again if I posted this question in the wrong place. :)

Welcome to the forums.   Have a look at TOR:

http://www.torproject.org/ (http://www.torproject.org/)

TOR is not perfect and really isn't 100% anonymous, but it should do the trick for what you are trying to accomplish.   You would need to configure you IRC client to connect through a proxy.

Ketchup beat me to it...  (today's been crazy busy!!!)

TOR or any other anonymous proxy would be where you'd want to start looking, to accomplish this.

Good luck.

Not to hi-jack the topic, but has TOR improved a bit?  Last time I tried it was horrendously slow.

Basically the slower TOR is, the more anonymous you are.  I don't think it can be any other way.  If you aren't familiar with how it works, it encrypts your traffic then routes it through multiple nodes.  Each node adds it's own layer of encryption as well.  So, the more nodes you pass through, the more anonymous you are.  However, that also means your traffic is bouncing around several TOR nodes before reaching it's destination.  So if I'm traveling from A to B and A to B is a straight line, going from A to C to D to X to Z ... to B will take longer.  That's just how it is.

i'm new to the forum but with my experiance with IRC this program seems to work good http://easy-vpn.comodo.com/ Easy-VPN it allows you to create a VPN to either another computer, or a completely seperate network, you'll have to run the setup on both machines then link the external IPs, i've used it in the past between my server and my laptop with pretty decent luck, just my .02