Hooking Debian to a Windows VM VPN connection

[Cassiano Leal <cassianoleal@gmail.com>]

Hi list,

I would like to know if it is possible to achieve what I am trying to.

Here's the situation.. In my work I have a few tools that only work on
Windows. Apart from that, to hook to the company's VPN I need some
proprietary tools that again only run on Windows. To work around these
issues I have installed Win XP on a VM using VirtualBox. This way I
can use most stuff on Debian and the few tools that are Win-only I run
inside the VM.

The problem is that I need to work from home sometimes and, again, the
VPN only works on Windows. I can use the VPN on the VM all right, but
wanted to be able to hook my Debian network to the VPN that's running
on Windows.

The VM's network is set to bridge mode, which means that it connects
directly to the router and has its own LAN IP. It is using the same
interface as Debian (the wifi card in this case), but they have
different IP addresses and can talk to each other. I even set up an
SSH server on the VM and could connect to it from Debian.

The problem seems to be that when I connect Windows to the VPN it
grabs a VPN IP address and changes the routing table. From that point
on I cannot talk to the Windows machine from Debian anymore.

Does anybody have any idea how could I achieve VPN connectivity on
Debian in this scenario?

I appreciate any comments.

Thanks,
Cassiano Leal