networking - How do I route a request for a specific website outside of Cisco Anyconnect VPN?

27
2013-10
  • Matthew Patrick Cashatt

    Thanks for looking.

    I am remotely doing some development work for a client and need to use their VPN to connect to their database and TFS server.

    The VPN client is Cisco AnyConnect and I am told it uses a split tunnel.

    I cannot connect to their public website when I am logged into their VPN. I can still connect to any other website I wish.

    This is a problem because to test the web application I am building for them, I need to be on their VPN so that I can access their database. At the same time, I need to be able to access their website because there are hundreds of product images that are sourced from it. In other words, I have to be able to display an image at "www.foo.com/images/someProductId.jpg" but can't because of the VPN issue.

    Oddly, I was able to access their site while on VPN earlier today, but after logging off of the VPN for lunch and then back in, I now can't access their site again.

    Is there a way for me to force any request for their public website to be made outside of the VPN tunnel?

    Thanks!

    • Answers
  • iDen

    hmmmm.... If you are on windows machine try to edit 

    %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

    Be sure to have admin rights to edit this file. Append next line in the end of file, change ip to ip of clients web server where site is located.

    192.168.50.110    www.foo.com

    If this not working you have to check "Default gateway" settings on your machine. Like you can try to enable "Use remote gateway" on network interface which VPN creates,, to go through clients network.


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  • Oliver Hanappi

    I don't know if it is possible but I would like to configure a Windows 7 VPN connection in a way that I can connect to a network which I normally reach by using Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client. Does Cisco use a protocol which Windows 7 understands also and where can I find the configuration details of the VPN connection?

    If you wonder why I'm trying to do this: I need to connect via VPN to several different networks from different companies/organizations/universities and each one uses its own VPN client. I don't want my computer to have 5 VPN clients installed, therefore I'm trying to replace them with simple Windows VPN connections.


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  • Joey

    That greatly depends on the configuration of the server. Cisco Concentrators can speak PPTP which works on nearly every version of Windows, but it's costly in terms of performance. The number of possible connections drops to about a tenth for the server so this is rarely activated.

    Furthermore there seems to be an option to enable L2TP. The documentation states that but at least for our university here no one figured out how to enable it and set it up.

    You would have to ask the person maintaining the server whether one of the above options apply.

    For the "usual" Cisco IPSec over UDP there is no native option in Windows, unfortunately.