July 2nd,2009 by Allan Bogh

In my line of work I will often have to connect to a customer's network using VPN software. While many of these connections work fine, some will disable the internet connection on the computer. This affects Windows and Ubuntu alike, but there's a fun way around this problem.

A customer gave me instructions to connect to their system using my computer. I attempted to connect and noticed the lack of internet on my Windows XP machine. I looked up the workaround to this and found that the network card's gateway is being overwritten, but there's a checkbox to fix this in the network settings dialog. The problem is whenever this connection is disabled and re-enabled the checkbox reverts to the checked state. Instead of scripting some fancy fix for this I decided to try something different.

I used a virtual machine running on VMWare with Windows XP installed for the VPN connection. So now I have my work computer connected to a VM through the VMWare web console. To connect to and use this computer I have 2 choices, either use the VMWare console or use Windows Remote Desktop. I opted against using Windows Remote Desktop for this connection because the RD tabs would get in the way of eachother when I RDed into the client computer. Once connected to the VM, I started up the VPN to the customer's site and started an RD session to the computer. The lag is somewhat noticeable, but manageable.

So the order is: Windows XP Desktop ⇒ VM Console ⇒ VPN ⇒ RD

In order to catch up on the project I decided to work from home. At home I have an Ubuntu 64bit system running Ubuntu 9.04. I've set up my VPN connection to connect to my work network. Ubuntu currently has some trouble with maintaining the intenet connection as well, but this is a matter of configuration. I can't change the configuration from the GUI VPN interface, so I had to figure out a way around the lack of internet connection.

I can now use my VPN connection from home, connect to my work, RD to my work desktop using KRDC, use VMWare to connect to my VM workstation, use the client's VPN software to connect to their network, then use another RD to view the client's computer.

Now the order is: Ubuntu Desktop ⇒ Ubuntu VPN ⇒ KRDC to Work Desktop ⇒ VM Console ⇒ VPN ⇒ RD to Client

Using all of these systems in this way I can also run Pandora and listen to music from my work computer, streaming the audio to my desktop at home, thanks to KRDC which has remote audio capabilities.