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Having just signed up for an account with a VPN provider, I'm trying to make sure that I'm setup in a way that all traffic (and DNS requests) are going through their server. I can see via http://whatismyipaddress.com/ that requests are indeed going through the VPN, but on DNSleaktest.com I still seem to be using my ISPs DNS servers.

I'm on Slackware 14. I was under the impression that a "tunneling" VPN would resolve DNS requests via the VPN server, not via an initial request made by the local device. I'm not sure how to tell if my connection is tunneling or not (and I'm using OpenVPN 2.2). I can get the machine to use the Google Public DNS by changing /etc/network/interface, but that seems backwards.

My question is fairly high level, but what do I need to do / check to make sure all traffic including DNS requests is actually happening over the VPN?

zchtodd
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1 Answers1

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The VPN interface must be set as your default gateway. If you don't do this, only when you access addresses within the VPN interface's subnet will traffic traverse it. Tunneling won't change this. Doing it manually in Windows and Linux (and possibly OSX) involves using the route command (or ip route on Linux)

Most VPN software, including OpenVPN, can be set to take care of this automatically. Windows tends to have weirdness with its network commands so you want to let the VPN software handle it if possible on that platform. Ask your VPN provider for a configuration file or specific instructions that let you operate it in the way you want.

LawrenceC
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