Quick one: how is traffic passed through a VPN connection? I'm working from home today so I've got a VPN connection to access work stuff. How do I know if regular internet traffic is or is not passed through it?

12/10/2008 8:42:34 AM

go to http://www.whatismyip.com and see if that looks like your home ip or work ip.

12/10/2008 10:18:06 AM

more than likely all traffic will be passed through your VPN connection.

Split tunneling is generally considered a security hole and as an industry best practice it's usually disabled, meaning that all of your network traffic is going to be IPsec encapsulated and routed through your VPN tunnel.

12/10/2008 10:22:09 AM

hmmmm, interesting

I just thought to use task manager to see which adapter has activity and the Cisco VPN does in fact remain flat until I access a corporate URL, cool.

12/10/2008 10:52:28 AM

Through the software VPN, usually only traffic that goes to the configured domain in the VPN client is encrypted, everything else is public internet and unencrypted.

[Edited on December 10, 2008 at 11:08 AM. Reason : clearer statement]

12/10/2008 11:07:36 AM

the problem arises when you go to look up website addresses

usually, your vpn client sets the system's default dns servers to those of your corporation so you can resolve internal URLs... yes, your regular web traffic itself may not be passed through the vpn, but your employer can (if they wanted to) track every domain name you visited.

general rule of thumb: only connect to a corporate VPN when you have a need to do so

12/10/2008 2:32:24 PM

Correlary: Also only do what you need to do while connected.

12/10/2008 2:43:42 PM