[semperit]

Sorry if my question is too stupid:

I just set up a VPN connection to my workplace's VPN server. It's up and running. Being a network Dummy, however, I am wondering if an active VPN tunnel means that ALL traffic to the internet is channeled through it, including browsing, Dropbox, and Mail. Is there a way to verify this or don't I need to worry about it?

Thanks for any clarification.

[ghporter]

Welcome to our forums!

Whether or not your VPN is handling all of your traffic depends on a number of things, including the VPN system at either end, and your setup. In general, you should expect a simple VPN connection to be channeling all of your traffic to the other end. The VPN doesn't typically know that you might want your browser to channel ONLY work traffic through it, so it will grab all the traffic.

This is an oversimplification, but it is a good rule of thumb: unless you've set up different connections for different traffic (including mail, web surfing, IMs, etc) then a basic VPN will simply route all of your traffic through to its distant end. Knowing what VPN system you're using would help with providing you specifics on how to manage this sort of thing (if it is possible).

Again, welcome!

[Waragainstsleep]

If you are using the built in VPN on OS X, there is a check box under the advanced options for the VPN in system prefs to route all traffic through the VPN.

[mduell]

traceroute will show you where the traffic to a particular host is going.

[besson3c]

I've not heard of being able to route traffic for particular applications only through a VPN as ghporter has described, in my experience it is either all routing traffic or just joining the VLAN so that your machine can talk to others on the VLAN, and this is dependent on the configuration of the VPN server.

[ghporter]

I've read about apps that included a VPN component for their own traffic but did not route all the other apps' traffic through it, probably to avoid excess traffic through their special servers. The ones that stuck in my mind used the VPN for secure communication of special data like financial records. Too bad that's about the only thing that I remember...

[semperit]

Thanks for the hints. That's very helpful.