VPNs and routing

I'm new to using a VPNs.

My VPN indicated it was active with the endpoint outside of the U.S.

For grins and giggles I decided to log in to my wireless router using Firefox.

It was successful.

I thought all traffic would be tunneled through the VPN, thereby making my LAN traffic unreachable.

Is it normal behavior to reach a local host with an active VPN.

Thanks.

Is it normal behavior to reach a local host with an active VPN.

Yes. With the way a machine resolves IP's, it will look for address on it's subnet (so your local LAN) but if the address is not on the same subnet, it sends it to the gateway. (in this case an altered gateway being the VPN)

Okay I'm just curious, but if I had a VPN connection, and my machine was on 10.1.0.0/24, what would happen when I tried to access a server on another local subnet (a separate VLAN for example, where normally the router handles routing between subnets) 10.2.0.0/24

Because you have two interfaces it will use your network interface for your lan network and it will use the vpn interface for the vpn network. No routing is happening because you're not sending traffic between networks. When you access the internet then the traffic will go to the default gateway, which by default will be the vpn gateway but you can change it to your local gateway if you just want to access the resources on the vpn network.

Now if you needed to access things which are behind a router on your local network as well as assessing the internet on the vpn or something else which is behind a router on the vpn network then you need to configure static routes. So you would tell your computer to use a certain gateway for certain networks and all other traffic (ie the internet) will go to the default gateway.

 

 

Oh I didn't read that properly. So in that case you would need to set up a static route for the 10.2.0.0/24 network to use your local gateway.