I’m a consultant and I use Google Drive extensively for work purposes. Working from my home office, I provide my own internet service, and I connect to this one client via their GlobalProtect VPN.
This client blocks Google Drive. What I’ve been doing to get around this is to use a second computer to connect to Google Drive. I pass files back and forth between the two computers through file shares. It works ok, but does wastes a minute every time I need to do this. It adds up over the course of the day.
So, I’d like to check in with you guys to see if it is possible to work around it. Is it possible for me to set up Firefox, for example, so that it uses my home network (ie. traffic does not go through the VPN), while my other traffic will continue to go through my client’s VPN?
Thanks in advance.
I’m a consultant as well. I use VMWare Workstation and have a separate VM for each company. I launch whichever VPN client is needed from within the VM.
You can then enable Shared Folders to copy files to your main computer.
I don’t know what kind of consulting you do or what kind of data you are storing on Google Drive, but your client has taken security steps to prevent their data from ending up on Google Drive.
You should be discussing this with your client so that you can better understand any concerns they might have, instead of looking for a way to work around the security they have implemented.
You are opening yourself up to a whole lot of potential legal trouble in the event that something unfortunate happens.
Pretty sure you could set up a proxy server at home, then configure Firefox to connect through the proxy.
No this would fundamentally break VPNs. You need to ask this client to allow Google Drive for your account or get them to split tunnel it on their side.
I like that idea, I will explore this route. Thank you!
Really good idea here. So do you RDP to that vm if you need to take advantage of a bigger screen? What is your workflow like?
Thanks for your concern! Rest assured that I’ve already cleared my usage of Google Drive with them. The Google Drive restriction is something they inherited from their parent company, and applies to employees only, not consultants. What you listed makes perfect sense, just doesn’t apply to my specific case.
Thanks again!
Could be an interesting project in the near future, thanks for the idea!
Yep this is certainly the way especially if you don’t want the client to know what you’re doing. Setting up Squid proxy is easy enough. At my home I’m running a pfsense so it’s easy enough
Firefox.exe could be split tunneled by application path but the admins would need to do this. And they’d do Google drive before they allowed a non split tunnel browser as a whole.
Thanks for your reply, and I can see why this would violate the fundamental philosophy of VPNs. I suppose it’s back to my two-computer setup!
and split tunneling is not allowed as a security policy in most orgs.
With VMWare Workstation I usually just make a VM take the full screen. No need to use RDP.
You could get them to add a split tunnel exception for your firefox app
We have profiles just for external parties that only have access to what they need.