Possible to mix local DNS with VPN and avoid DNS leaks?

[Pulse 0]

Here's the situation. The connection to my ISP is via 'dual access'. Basically, one makes a PPTP connection to the ISP and Internet connections are routed over that connection. Via this connection, I receive two IP addresses, a Public, routable address and an RFC 1918 address in the 172.16.0.0/12 range. (Actually there's three IP addresses, there's also the LAN range from my router 192.168.0.0/16)

On the router the Interfaces are:

Br0 - 192.168.0.0/16

ppp0 - Public IP address

vlan1 - 172.16.0.0/12

To access the services offered by the ISP (those on the 172 network) I have to make use of the ISPs DNS server.

Most of the client PCs are running Windows 7 and the gateway is a Tomato based router - I'm thinking about moving the VPN endpoint to the router but I have to think about family members.

Is there anyway I can maintain access to the ISP services (name Server) whilst also also using the VPN, without compromising the security? Would I be better served moving the VPN endpoint to the router?

Thanks.

[Staff 9972]

Hello!

Before proceeding, can you confirm that you connect to your ISP via PPTP (it sounds very strange to us)?

Kind regards

[Pulse 0]

Hello!

Before proceeding, can you confirm that you connect to your ISP via PPTP (it sounds very strange to us)?

Kind regards

Yes, I can confirm the main connection to the ISP is via PPTP. It's one type of dual access connections in Russia. Others use L2TP and PPPoE.

See the image. It's not my router but it shows the connection types commonly found.

[Pulse 0]

Any further thoughts on this please?

Thanks

[Staff 9972]

Hello!

OpenVPN over PPTP should pose no problem with our servers configuration and push.

About DNS, if your ISP DNS is public, from your Windows systems you can tunnel DNS queries through our servers by setting the ISP DNS IP addresses in the tun interface (TAP-Win32 Adapter), while on Linux systems you can simply force them as first nameserver(s) in /etc/resolv.conf

In this way your ISP DNS servers will receive queries from our servers, not from your system.

Kind regards

[Pulse 0]

Thanks for the reply. I'll have a play with the DNS settings, perhaps I can also make use of dnsmasq on my router...