Directing VPN and RDP traffic through wireless connection

Question

OS: Windows 7

I have two internet connections in work, a corporate LAN (connecting us to the main data centre) and a local ADSL connection. The former is wired and the latter is wireless. I am using a VPN client to connect to a customer's network.

I use VPN client which allows me to to RDP to a customer's machine. The corporate LAN does not allow RDP connections outside the organisation so I use the local ADSL connection which has completely unrestricted access to the internet. I can connect to the wireless and corporate LAN at the same time. However, the RDP connection to the customer machine will only get established if I physically disconnect the network cable connecting to the corporate LAN. Is there a means of forcing RDP connections to use a certain adapter? I'd like to be able to view resources on the corporate LAN periodically throughout the day without having to reconnect.

Answer 1

Right now your RDP client (Part of windows) is attempting to open a connection to 123.123.123.123 and as that address is not local to your network it goes to the default route 0.0.0.0 with the lowest metric. Windows automatically assigns priority to wired vs wireless networks (naturally) so it will traverse that network.

If you add a static route to your machine for destination 123.123.0.0/16 say and specify your VPN interface as the interface to use then it won't fall back to the default route and try the LAN connection.

You could tell windows to prioritize the WLAN interface instead, but if you need access to other company resources this may cause you problems so I would't advise it.