Office products cannot connect when VPN active

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wellumies

Posts: 2
Joined: Tue May 23, 2017 5:19 pm

Post by wellumies » Fri Aug 09, 2019 7:54 pm
For some reason this is a problem with the current version of Viscosity. Office products like Outlook check the default gateway of the current active connection. Default Gateway from the VPN connection is empty. So I can browse the internet just fine, but Office products determine that I have no default GW.

https://www.macwheeler.com/windows-10-office-365-cannot-connect-over-openvpn-fixed/

I can see the default GW in the routing rules, but it still appears as empty in the adapter settings

If I check the routing rules and manually add the gw to the VPN adapter, then Outlook and other start to work again

Eric

User avatar
Posts: 1146
Joined: Sun Jan 03, 2010 3:27 am

Post by Eric » Mon Aug 12, 2019 9:17 am
Hi wellumies,

I find it quite disturbing that Office and other Windows products would require an identified network to work, however this is actually quite simple to test with Viscosity. You can effectively spoof a gateway, making the connection "Public" by default (can be switched once connected), quite simply. Edit your connection and go to the Networking tab. Add a new route with:

Destination: 0.0.0.0
Mask: 0.0.0.0
Gateway: VPN Gateway
Metric: 999

This will work with both split traffic and full traffic connections. We highly recommend you never set your VPN network connection status to Private, ever, though.

We'll do some more testing on this ourselves today to see if we can find a better solution as requests about Office 365 have picked up a bit lately.

Regards,
Eric
Eric Thorpe
Viscosity Developer

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