In the time of coronavirus pandemic, many companies rely on home office. While working in the home office, the entire data traffic is transferred via the VPN server. So you can use the internal services/tools but also online services like Google, Spotify, Youtube or Zoom.
This means a hard time for the VPN servers, which have to transfer the entire traffic from your PC to the internal tools, online services and back to your PC.
In order not to overload the VPN servers, you don’t want to transfer data intensive services like Youtube over the VPN. Also, you don’t want to send data flow sensitive services like audio/video communication tools over the VPN (unless you want the additional encryption).
One solution to this could be an route exception for such services. So that the services will bypass the VPN and will be directly routed to the internet.
OpenVPN bypass
If your are using OpenVPN, you can easily add routes to bypass VPN for a specific domain.
Just open your openvpn client config (.opvn or .conf filetype) and add your bypass/route you like.
E.g.: just add follow lines after the line:
route remote_host 255.255.255.255 net_gateway
My VPN routes
1 | route youtube.com 255.255.255.255 net_gateway # For youtube |
OpenVPN client username / password
Another handy OpenVPN client config is “auth-user-pass”, which allows you to save username and password for the VPN. So that you don’t need to input your username/password every time you enable the VPN (E.g. if you have VPN in autostart).
Just add follow line to the config
1 | auth-user-pass pass.txt |
And create a file named “pass.txt” next to the OpenVPN config file. The content of the pass.txt file is just:
1 | yourusername |