I’m rather new to NordVPN and switched over from Private Internet Access due to well, the fact that PIA is headquartered in the US and obviously have to obey US laws. Also I came to NordVPN as they advertise their speed being better and Nordlynx to be the best over any other implementation including PIA’s WireGuard.
So I switched, and got everything going and well, I guess I was spoiled by PIA’s split tunneling actually… working on Windows. Only the programs I told it to use the VPN only used the VPN and everything else properly bypassed it.
Cue NordVPN’s split tunneling. Set it up the same way to only use the VPN for specified programs but everything seems to be impacted by it still. While I do get my ISP IP on the programs not told to use the VPN, it’s obvious that it is still using the VPN for DNS or something as for example in my browser which isn’t in the list to use the VPN (that’s what the extension is for so I can toggle it whenever) going to for example HBO Max gets a DNS probe failure and as soon as I disconnect the VPN it works just fine.
Read a post here in this subreddit about it being broken 2 years ago and that they were going to be fixing it very soon, but still seems to be broken?
PIA also played nice with my work VPN connection which is also split tunneled, once I connected to it any IPs that are set to use the work VPN would use it meanwhile PIA just minded its own business and did what it needed to do. NordVPN, same as above I have to disconnect for my work VPN split tunnel to work. Connects fine, just won’t actually allow me to go to the sites/services we have locked down that can only be visited via our VPN.
Is there any known fix for this? I’m assuming it’s most likely going to be just set DNS to use another DNS server outside NordVPN?
Yeah, I used the splitt feature for X apps that I want to be tunneled via VPN.
However it works to a degree but for example when i want to play Apex Legends it doesn’t let me as the split feature is breaking it.
I just tried a couple of different VPN’s over the weekend, including Nord and Express, the split tunneling blew chunks when I tried to split what apps do or do not use VPN. Everything worked ok with VPN on or VPN totally off, but I could not split properly.
Since both VPNs bit the dust with split tunneling, I did some serious digging and installed NordVPN with the same os and os patch level in a VM in VMware Workstation (VM running on same laptop having issues). What do you know, everything within the VM worked perfectly and Nord functioned with both split tunneling and regular mode.
I took a USB-C network adapter and plugged it into my laptop (the system with issues) and hardwired it to my router, disabled my wireless, and tested NordVPN. NordVPN and ExpressVPN worked flawlessly, including split tunneling.
This means it was something with my wireless adapter.
I have a Dell laptop and it has the Killer Wireless Adapter. I looked and the adapter drivers had not been updated in over a year (I never update drivers unless absolutely necessary) so I decided to update them. After testing, Nord and Express were still not working as it should with tunneling.
Further digging, I went in to the Service Manager in windows, and found 3 or 4 services for the Killer Wireless running. I disabled all of the services and boom everything worked perfect.
So check the services and make sure there are no services running for the systems network adapter you are tunneling through. So if you have an Intel, Killer, or whatever brand wireless or hardwired adapter and there are services running for it, turn them off. This could be your issue. You may even have to do a combo of updating the drivers and disabling services. Mine had nothing to do with DNS and I even tried some of the stuff I found online and tried, and nothing prevailed.
Mine is working now as it should, but the solution is that you have to use DNS servers outside NordVPN so now your DNS queries leak but you can at least split tunnel properly .
Really bad solution and I wish NordVPN would fix it, I mean all they have to do is look at how PIA does it, which is anything on the use VPN list uses the VPN DNS and you can then set everything else to use whatever DNS you set in the program or even just to use whatever you have setup normally for the network connection.
In my case, the adapter had 5 different services for the set to run by default. I had to kill 4 of the 5 services from running. Only one of the services initiated was the core driver. The rest of the services were utilized for analytics and management (like throttling a particular app). Once these were turned off, everything worked as it should.
Same here. I set CloudFlare as the DNS server in Windows settings, but split tunneling still doesn’t work (for the apps that I’m trying with). u/kicktd Is there any specific step or setting that you needed to choose for split tunneling to work?
I would like to post a link to my other post regarding this issue because it’s basically a tunneling problem where of nordvpn is actually using the vpn server before they let you use your own connection to these application, see this post i made → https://www.reddit.com/r/nordvpn/comments/152z9xz/comment/jtu9iyk/?context=3
Please let me know if there are some errors. Because I’ve noticed that in general almost all applications are being used by the VPN even the one you decided to exclude via split tunneling feature. I even made a simple program that connects to net and checked the connection pattern with and without splittunneling how it worked and in both cases it used the VPN instructions to go further which will cause errors depending on application ie, apex legends.
u/geiszla I honestly forgot how I got it working with an external DNS setup, I believe I had to set it on the nordVPN program itself as the DNS servers to use. I’ve since switched back to my old VPN provider who actually knows how to have a functioning split tunnel with zero issues in regards to DNS
Guess all the claims that nordVPN is the best they put out in their ads and YouTube sponsorships isn’t really the truth
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