How To Set Up Split Tunneling with VPN
Introduction
A lot of our work nowadays requires using and connecting to a Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) in order to access certain resources (e.g. databases, websites, REST APIs) that were deemed important to protect from the public internet. When we connect to the VPN, we're able to access these resources.
The nature of our modern digital work requires simultaneous access to a plethora of services. Some of these services require an active VPN connection and some can be accessed without.
At times, the VPN we need to connect to is geolocated far from us. In addition, the VPN can be one that serves the entire company and is not very performant. These factors result in an experience of collective latency accessing resources, restricted and unrestricted ones alike.
If you find/found yourself in this type of situation before, this post will explain how you can circumvent that and suffer latency only when accessing the restricted resources instead of all resources by modifying the operating system routing tables in what's called 'Split Tunneling'.
To do this you will need to have root/administrator access to the UNIX operating system.
We begin by collecting the relevant information and later performing the modifications.