Hi, I have been using OpenVPN for quite a while, and just switched my client computer from Windows XP to Windows 7 ... and found a very interesting artifact (=problem ... :-)). Let me try to explain ...
The client machine is on one network, which has it's own DNS servers, and DNS suffix (let's call it client.net). From this network DNS and internet access works fine. Then, from the client machine I connect back to the OpenVPN server (call it's network server.net), and allow my router DHCP to serve the OpenVPN IP address information so that the client machine is then on the server subnet. This works great - but DNS has become a problem with Windows 7. With Windows XP, DNS for my machine still used the client.net DNS servers, so I could access my local network, the internet, and by IP address (or entries in the host file) I could get back to the server.net network. I had no DNS resolution for the server.net network, but that was livable (using the hosts file locally). Basically the server.net DNS servers were lower in the priority order, so no major issues. Now, with Windows 7, when I make the OpenVPN connection, the DNS servers provided by the DHCP server become primary - and this is very much a problem, because now I have name resolution back to the server.net network, but that doesn't work of course for the client.net domain. Also, I actually lose internet access, because the client.net suffix is being added to DNS requests send back over the OpenVPN link - so internet access is dead as well ... :-(. I even have to apply the suffix .server.net. (note the trailing .) to get name resolution on the server network. Does anyone know how to resolve this? The best case would be for local name resolution for all client.net or internet requests, and "remote" resolution only for the server.net network (based on connection specific suffix). Any ideas how to do this? Thanks in advance for your suggestions! ... Russell
