I am thinking of running Mullvad from my home router, because I have some devices that does not have support for WireGuard.
But I also work from home, and when my company laptop connects to the internet, it will turn on the corporate VPN automatically. Would the presence of the Mullvad VPN on the router affect the corporate VPN, or stop it working?
i deal with this scenario frequently, so i will answer the main question(s):
i run the vpn on my own router at home, 24/7. all traffic or none. nothing escapes unless i explicitly allow it to.
i can easily spin up a virtual machine or windows sandbox instance to install the company vpn inside of. now my traffic is both secured exiting mullvad’s tunnel, and still yet secured exiting the company vpn into their internal network.
i have no worries.
fast edit: you need a router that supports wireguard instead of openvpn, and has good processing power to support your bandwidth need.
It would. It’d add a lot if latency though. It might also set off warning flags at your work that you might be compromised if you connect to the VPN from out of country. I know my company would lock down my account. You’ll want to see if you can either do split tunneling on your router. Or if you can assign the work machines MAC address to a virtual subnet that doesn’t route through the VPN on it’s way out.
Is it possible to do split tunnelling on a router?
Or what can I do to try and maintain the speed? I have to do Teams calls and Zoom calls and I am worried about the internet speed affecting the video calls. Do I have to turn it off on the router when I am using the work laptop?
Sorry if I am asking stupid questions, this is all rather new for me.
Why would you want to install a VM on a company laptop and run the VPN inside of it, and most likely break the corporate security policy by doing it? The idea of corporate VPNs is not only allowing internal connections, but also enforcing known devices and software policies, AD credentials, which you would definitely violate if
you install an own VM which was not made from the .iso your corporation uses. I’m not even mentioning the potential piracy issue here, which is another topic.
You could easily have Wireguard/OpenVPN on a router and connect to a VPN on a device behind it without such weird solutions.
You should be fine. Your corporate VPN is already policy based and will not route all internet traffic via your company. This is used only to give you access to some internal resources. So whatever you can do just with Mullvad alone (Teams/Zoom) will have the same quality as with your corporate VPN connected. If your router is not potato you should be able to push 10Mbit/s which is already enough for 720p videos.
there is nothing weird about the solution when company devices more or less become ‘your life’. yes, policy this and that; i don’t care. it’s my privacy.
Thank you for your replies.
The main reason I am trying to setup the VPN on the router is I have to go for a work assignment to China, for at least a year. So, I am thinking of setting up the router when I am still in the UK, before disappearing behind the Great Firewall, with the router in luggage.
So, likely the servers I am aiming for is probably a UK/US one so I can access the stuff I wanted to stream. That would be *pretty* far from China, so I think the speed will be affected.
Another question, can i still torrent if I set my router to a UK server? I know torrent sites are blocked on the UK ISP.
If it is too complicated with that, then I might try using another device as a virtual router, for the devices I want to use for UK streaming, and then using the Mullvad app on the personal laptop I want to do torrenting, so I can deaignate another server?
Some companies route all internet traffic through the vpn tunnel. A few of my company’s customers require this for some obscure reason.
Streaming services are not working well with VPNs in general, regardless of the server location. And it will be quite slow to do anything over such distance and latency.
For China it is recommended to use HK/SG servers.
No sites are blocked on UK servers anyway, the law applies to residential ISPs only.