How Not to Use Default Gateway on VPN (PPTP) in Mac OSX

· 4 Comments

Well, after search­ing for hours and hours, I have final­ly found a solu­tion to a small but trou­ble­some prob­lem. The prob­lem (if you call it that) occurs when I tried con­nect­ing to my work’s VPN. Rather than not using my work’s gate­way when con­nect­ed, OSX does this by default. Hence, you can see and hit your inter­nal IPs but not resolve the rest of the inter­net.

In Win­dows XP, this may be dis­abled via the fol­low­ing:

  1. Open Net­work Con­nec­tions
  2. Under Vir­tu­al Pri­vate Net­work, open the Prop­er­ties of your con­nec­tion
  3. Click and open Prop­er­ties for “Inter­net Pro­to­cal (TCP/IP)”
  4. Click on Advanced
  5. Dis­able “Use default gate­way on remote net­work”
  6. Hit OK, OK, and then you’re done

Although it’s easy in Win­dows XP, I could­n’t fig­ure it out for OSX. I searched and search to final­ly get this arti­cle from macosx­hints, Avoid Cre­at­ing PPTP Default Routes. The hints at the very bot­tom of the com­ments helped some­what, but did­n’t get me to view my inter­nal IPs—which was the reverse of the orig­i­nal prob­lem. Luck­i­ly, with a lit­tle bit more search, I land­ed on this arti­cle page by Chris­t­ian Stock­er on Chang­ing default routes on OSX on VPN. Though it was the same as the pre­vi­ous page from macosx­hints, I saw this short and sweet reply which hap­pen to have fixed every­thing:

lon­nie @ 22.08.2006 19:22 CEST
Inter­net Con­nect 1.4.2 has

Con­nect Menu -> Options…

|X| Send all traf­fic over VPN con­nec­tion

Uncheck­ing should do the same.

I hope this arti­cle could be of help, and save those who are look­ing for the same solu­tion san­i­ty and time.

4 Comments

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  1. bullet

    on snow leo you do not have an “advanced” but­ton in the prefs.
    and the option “use vpn for all traf­fic” does although not work.…
    any idea haw to fix?

  3. Jelle

    I need­ed to do a lit­tle bit more; On snow leop­ard you have to set the VPN as the first net­work ser­vice. With the small set­tings icon on the bot­tom of the net­work pref­er­ences there is the option “change ser­vice order”. Hope this helps some­one too.