VPN Configuration

Doug — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:06:15 -0600

I’m working from home a lot requiring a VPN connection to my work. The default VPN setup for the Mac is a little less than ideal; it routes all traffic through the VPN. As our VPN is a little sluggish, I’d like for only work related traffic to route through the VPN. Here’s what I had to do.

I started with this Mac OSX Hint to Set no default route for VPN Client via PPTP/L2TP. The hint says to set nodefaltrouter in /etc/ppp/vpn-name and then do my routing in /etc/ppp/ip-up. The good news is that in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger, there’s a configuration option for Internet Connect to toggle setting of the default route. Progress: all my traffic is no longer going over VPN.

Problem: my local DNS can’t do lookups for the company’s LAN. So, I go into Network Preferences for the VPN and statically assign the DNS Servers.

Hmmm, that should work but host name lookup still doesn’t work. Ah, I still don’t have a route defined for the corporate LAN to use the VPN. So, I create /etc/ppp/ip-up to include this simple command:

#!/bin/sh
route add 10.1.0.0/16 -interface ppp0

Unfortunately, this doesn’t automatically set the route when I establish the VPN connection. So, that’s where I stand. I’ve got /etc/ppp/ip-up chmod +x and manually run it when I initiate my VPN connection. Also, I think this whole setup will affect my other VPN configuration for which I do want all traffic to use. Ah, well… nothing’s perfect.

@Lathi.net: VPN Configuration

VPN Configuration