How to bypass VPN for specific websites and IPs on Mac OS

There are some good reasons to not use a VPN at times. It can be a pain that your VPN is working for watching Hulu but you can’t access a website in your country because your IP shows you are somewhere else. There are also websites that completely forbid the use of a VPN with their services and block certain things or threaten to ban accounts. It can also be tricky to access machines on your own local network. Luckily there is no need to turn off your VPN any time you come across these problems, it can be fixed with something called “Static Routing”.

Static Routing uses a manually-configured option rather than the default information from the dynamic routing protocol.

Setting up Static Routing

To permit access for some IPs to your real IP (bypass VPN) you have to create some special rules. For that you will need your Gateway IP and the websites IP.

1. Go to Applications -> Utilities and open the Terminal (1).

   

2. We need to find the IP address of the website we want to bypass the VPN. Write in the Terminal:
 ping -c1 website_name (2). 
In return you will receive the site’s IP (3). Let’s name it yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy


   

3. You have to find your Gateway IP. To do that you need to write in the Terminal: netstat -r (4) and look at the Gateway column (5).

   

   It should look like 192.168.XX.XX; once you find it take a note of it because we will need it later.

4. We create the routing rule. Just write: sudo route –nv add yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy 192.168.x.x (6) where yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy is the website’s IP and 192.168.x.x is your gateway.

   

To test if this works you can add a rule for www.cactusvpn.com to see if after enabling the rule it shows your real IP on this page. You can compare this result with the result of any other IP lookup website.

To remove the static route, type: sudo 
route delete yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy (7).