How to configure custom traffic routing on a client device using routing utilities to separate work and personal traffic through a VPN?

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The standard behavior of most VPN clients is to redirect absolutely all device internet traffic through a remote gateway. However, in practice, there is often a need to route only specific domains or subnets through the VPN, leaving other connections to work via the local provider to maintain high access speeds to local resources.

To implement selective routing, the operating system's routing tables or advanced clients with support for domain name-based rules are used. In Linux systems, this is implemented using the ip route utility combined with packet marking via iptables or nftables, which allows intercepting requests to specific IP addresses.

1. Determine the list of target domains or subnets that should be processed through the VPN connection.
2. Configure a local DNS server that will resolve the addresses of these domains into special IP addresses bound to the virtual interface.
3. Add static routes in the operating system's routing tables, specifying the VPN client interface as the gateway for the selected IP ranges.
4. Check the correctness of the rule application using route tracing commands to ensure that requests to the necessary resources go through the tunnel, while the rest go directly.

Using such configurations requires regular updating of routing lists, as many modern web resources use dynamic IP address pools and distributed CDN content delivery networks.

How to configure custom traffic routing on a client device using routing utilities to separate work and personal traffic through a VPN?

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