VPN issues on web browsing

Question

I'm using Ubuntu Maverick and this is the setup:

Our router connects us to the company's VPN through which we can access some internal websites. I have to connect also to a customer's VPN in order to use remote desktop and their websites daily.

This customer has a web interface to connect to its VPN, it launches a Java App which signs us in and lets us use the services on their network.

When I do this, I loose access to my company's VPN services (websites) in all browsers. This doesn't happen in the rest of the (Windows) boxes, and I'm the only one using GNU/Linux on the office.

Right now, I log out of the customer's VPN to access the company's services, but I'm sure there's some solution so that I can use both VPNs together.

Edit: The customer's VPN is used via a Juniper Networks login (a Java Client), and I get automatically connected into the company's VPN through the router.

Answer 1

At least one of the VPN systems are probably set up to Full Tunnelling rather than Split Tunnelling.

Full tunnelling means route 0.0.0.0/0 (everything) via the VPN tunnel, and split tunnelling means route only the organization's specific IP addresses.

Check your route table with "ip route list".

In order to circumvene the full vs split configuration set up by the VPN administrator, you probably need to wrap your own VPN client. Theoretically not very hard, since most of these SSL-VPN solutions just wrap a PPP interface with SSL and funnel it to port 443 on the gateway, but in practice it can get tricky.

I've done it a couple of times, and two things that will really bug you is that the standard PPPD daemon on Linux is a bitch (a user mode executable running on top of TUN/TAP would have been a beautiful blessing, pppd is a mess), and you usually need to touch some very specific URLs on the SSL-VPN gateway before it will let you connect a tunnel. Such as, authenticate with web forms and get various cookies, etc.