VPN Tip to Help Road Warriors Connect

There is one thing worth noting when preparing for VPN connections – pick a good local subnet for your LAN.

For example, suppose you use the popular 192.168.0.0/24 subnet as your private LAN subnet. Now you are trying to connect via VPN from an Internet cafe which is using the same subnet for its WiFi LAN. You will have a routing conflict because your machine won’t know if 192.168.0.1 refers to the local WiFi gateway or to the same address on the VPN.

So, organisations would have a problem if the remote user happens to be on a 192.168.0.0/24 network when connecting back to the office.

The best solution is to avoid using 10.0.0.0/24 or 192.168.0.0/24 as private LAN network addresses. Instead, use something that has a lower probability of being used in a WiFi cafe, airport, or hotel where you might expect to connect from remotely. The best candidates are subnets in the middle of the vast 10.0.0.0/8 netblock (for example 10.66.77.0/24).

It probably won’t cause too much of a problem, but worth noting.

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