How to connect Workspace (Windows 10) to L2TP/IPSec VPN server

Question

I'm trying to connect to a remote corporate NAS from my Workspace instance through a VPN.  Whenever I attempt to do so - using Windows 10 VPN client configuration, the Workspace freezes.  I can see there is successful authentication with the NAS device if I look at the NAS's logs.  But on the Workspace, the connection attempt stops - and the Workspace completely freezes - at the "Completing connection" stage.  While troubleshooting, I've disabled Windows Firewall, and modified the AWS Directory security group rules to open up the relevant ports - to no avail.   Any ideas?

Answer

If you look at the network interfaces on your Workspaces you will see that there are two - one which connects to your VPC and another which is used for streaming traffic (keyboard, mouse, pixels, etc. that are delivered to and from the client machine you're using to access the Workspaes instance).

When you set up a VPN connection it will (by default) send all traffic from the Workspaces instance to the VPN endpoint - this breaks the streaming traffic because that traffic **must** use the network interface that is designated for streaming traffic.

To resolve this you can do two things:
 - Exclude the routes used for that network interface. You can find the routes in the Windows route table by running `route print`
 - Set up the VPN so that you limit the access over the VPN to just the corporate NAS IP address (or another smaller set of IP addresses). Because that doesn't include the range that the streaming interfaces uses it won't interfere with that traffic.

How to connect Workspace (Windows 10) to L2TP/IPSec VPN server

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