Can someone explain this VPN behaviour?

[Maximilian]

So I don't really understand VPN's as well as I thought I did

I am using nordvpn. Each client is configured individually, my home server connects to a VPN server. When my laptop connects to the same server the laptop loses all connection to my home server through the local network. It only works when the laptop connects to a different VPN server.

Is this normal behaviour? Why does this happen? Laptop and server are both opensuse, the VPN client is openvpn on both.

Also I recently had a router that could do VPN (had to send it back 5ghz radio was flaky) and that only had one VPN server configured on it, so all clients used the same VPN server and everything worked fine.

 

[Elixer]

VPN should only be enabled on the WAN interface, not the LAN.

When I do a VPN, I have all VPN traffic on tun0, eth0 is LAN traffic.
Not sure how you configured it, what do your firewall rules look like?

 

[mv2devnull]

A typical "roadwarrior" VPN config is that the VPN tunnel becomes the default route and only the VPN clients traffic (that transports the tunneled traffic) to server uses "public routes". Reaching link-local neighbours should not use the default route though.

What are your routes before and after enabling the VPN?

ip route show