Cisco AnyConnect VPN (of school) disables my wifi at home.

[Dainank]

Hi,

The school that I study at uses Cisco AnyConnect VPN to allow us to connect to their databases for our projects. I've connected to another 'link' (from the school) in the past and never had issues but when connecting to the link we require to access the databases, it will connect fine but my own connection won't work anymore (I get access to the school databases and they work fine, but I fail to make my own searches in google and basically use my own WiFi).

Another thing which is odd, is that I have been in calls with other people while connecting with AnyConnect and the call itself (for example on Discord) does not drop out and people can still hear me as can I hear them, even though I can't connect to any servers and do simple web searches or anything requiring a connection. If I try to join a call after connecting to AnyConnect it won't work.

Any ideas what might be causing this? I don't have much knowledge in this area.

Many thanks in advance and if you need any additional information please let me know!

[Aref Alsouqi]

Looks like your school VPN policy is to tunnel all traffic, and not allowing any local LAN accesses. This is a very common security best practice, and I don't think you can workaround it in anyway, since it is all set up at the headend side. One thing you might try to do which I don't recommend or suggest would be to remove the AnyConnect profile, and try to connect to the school VPN. What that would do is to bypass the AnyConnect profile you have downloaded to your client, but next time you connect to the VPN, the newly downloaded profile would kick in. But it is not necessarily going to work, because also here, it depends on how the headend is configured.