VPN Sharing Help

Jonny L · 31 Mar 2016 at 15:50

Hi Guys,

I have a bit of a unique scenario that I'm hoping you can assist with.

I often work from home and have a vpn setup on my laptop to connect to the server at the office to access files and our in-house quotation system.

However, this connection is very slow and my laptop can be also.Which is annoying as i have 200mb fibre and I'm sat there waiting for pdfs to download over vpn...

I have setup my office and outlook on my main desktop (see sig if relevant) and have my laptop sat next to me for the quotation software. I can access my laptop's local files over my network. BUT is there a way to view the files which my laptop accesses by VPN on my desktop without actually running the vpn on my desktop?

Sorry if this sounds really convoluted!

Thank you!

the-evaluator · 31 Mar 2016 at 16:53

Where are the files that your laptop wants to access? If they're on the desktop then yes, no VPN needed. If they're on a server at the other end of your VPN then you'll need to use the VPN unless you setup file sharing on the server to be accessible on the internet. That would be an extremely bad idea though.

Windows file sharing over a WAN link is generally pretty horrible irrespective of how much bandwidth you have to the server at the other end of the link.

tom_e · 31 Mar 2016 at 16:56

Surely you're going to have to go through the VPN one way or another so if that's you're bottleneck you'll only slow it down even more by adding extra steps.

meandu229 · 31 Mar 2016 at 16:57

You "might" be able to setup your laptop as a gateway but I would think the bottle neck is smb ontop of vpn over wan which is pretty terrible generally. Do you have a choice of vpn technologies as that can improve things.

Jonny L · 31 Mar 2016 at 19:02

Thanks for all the replies gents!

The reason for wanting to use the vpn on the laptop and not the desktop is that the vpn routes all my internet etc through the office servers which can be painful as i deal with huge artwork files a lot and receive these via WeTransfer and email. The VPN is also necessary for the quotation software which is accessed on the laptop through remote desktop to our server.

I would like to be able to access my files on the office server on my desktop without using a vpn on the desktop so that i don't lose my internet speed.

I just wondered as I could access the local files on my laptop through network sharing to my desktop, could i access the office network drives which the laptop connects to over vpn.

Thank you for all the help

the-evaluator · 1 Apr 2016 at 10:30

Depending on how the VPN works you may be able to stop it routing your internet traffic down the VPN tunnel..

Can you post the output of 'route print' from a command prompt. There's most likely a route for 0.0.0.0 (default route) pointing down the VPN. If you can drop that route and replace it with a route that the laptop would have before connecting to VPN then you may find that you can get to the internet without that traffic going down the VPN tunnel.

visibleman · 1 Apr 2016 at 14:24

As the-evaluator mentions, you might be able to get away without setting the VPN tunnel as the default gateway for all of your traffic (Under Windows, 'Use default gateway on remote network' is the option, buried within the Advanced options within network connection network) - 'office' traffic will get directed across the VPN, all other traffic uses your ISP.

However, speak to IT before changing anything!