How can I see my home network workgroup while connected to a VPN?

I have a home network with several computers, and they all belong to a workgroup. Now I also have a laptop from my employer. If I connect to my employer's VPN from the laptop I cannot see my home network's workgroup, but I can see my workgroup if I am not connected to their VPN. Unfortunately, that means I have to bounce on and off the VPN any time I want to print something to the printer connected to one of my home PCs. Inconvenient.





Is there a way I can see my home network's workgroup while I'm connected to my employer's VPN? Or do you suppose they have that locked down by group policy and there's no way around it?|||Sorry, there's no way around that.





The VPN is locked down so that traffic from your home LAN cannot pass to the corporate network. This is standard security practice. Many corporate networks have been infected by connections from unprotected home or public networks, hence the restrictions.|||TFTP

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|||It is possible your VPN has desktop policies assigned to it that block that kind of thing. VPN should only allow you to tunnell through the internet to securely link to the company site, and should not effect all traffic, but it may be encapsulating all traffic with the VPN IP address and therefore, that would not be recognized by the rest of your home workgroup.|||One other possibility is your employer's VPN network overlaps your home network. For example, your VPN connection assigns you the IP address 192.168.0.100 with subnet mask 255.255.255.0 and your home LAN IP is 192.168.0.2 with subnet mask 255.255.255.0. The VPN client software assumes anything you want to reach at 192.168.0.x is in your employer's network, so you can't reach anything locally. Consult your employer's network folks for assistance. You should be able to diagnose this from the output of 'ipconfig /all' in a Windows operating system. If this is the problem, your quickest fix is changing all the IP addresses of your home network. If you're using DHCP from your home router, you can change the DHCP server settings there.





Even if you aren't assigned an IP address that overlaps your home network, consult your employer's network folks to see if your home network overlaps with a network at work. Your VPN client software may temporarily install routes on your home machine to route traffic to your employer's network when attempting to reach IP addresses that you assume are only used at home. You may be able to diagnose this from the output of 'route print' at a command prompt in a Windows operating system.