Crowdway

If you’re a student at UGent and living in a dorm, you need to access the Internet through a VPN, but Minerva and Athena, a Citrix system, can be accessed locally. Using a clever line of commands, one can route all Athena traffic over the local network even though you’re connected through a VPN.

Obviously this will result in less lag when using Athena, but more importantly, it’ll also save precious megabytes of bandwidth from your VPN limit. All this while your regular internet connection remains untouched.

Type this in your shell:

for ip in `dig @ugdns1.ugent.be ugent.be axfr | grep citrix\
 | awk '{print $5}'`; do echo $ip;
sudo route add -net $ip netmask 255.255.255.255 eth0;
done;

It’ll find all Citrix-related addresses at UGent, and route them through your local network interface.

On the other hand, you need to connect through a VPN if you want to access Athena from outside of UGent. In this case, we can use our script to limit the VPN for Athena traffic only, and make all other Internet connections go locally. This will again save you precious megabytes from your VPN limit, while ensuring all other Internet traffic doesn’t get laggy.

sudo route add -net default eth0
for ip in `dig @ugdns1.ugent.be ugent.be axfr | grep citrix\
 | awk '{print $5}'`; do echo $ip;
sudo route add -net $ip netmask 255.255.255.255 tun0;
done;