Can't use HTTPS websites after connected to VPN

Question

My workplace uses a Cisco VPN. When I'm at home, connected wirelessly through my Linksys router, I'm having trouble loading HTTPS sites. (I'm using Ubuntu, which doesn't cache DNS entries) Here's a typical scenario:

1. Open Firefox/chrome
2. Visit https://github.com, logged in
3. Connect to the VPN
4. Click any link from Github home page (someone's repo for example)
5. Website just sits there spinning (Firefox's status bar displays "waiting for github.com ...")
6. Clear cache - makes no difference
7. Open github in new tab and click the same link again - doesn't work either
8. Restart Firefox
9. Open github and click the link again - now it works.

I've also tried:

• Explicitly using OPENDNS servers for both my VPN connection and wireless connection
• Disabling Firefox TLS

Would really appreciate any help debugging this at all!

Answer 1

Talked to my network admin. He said that this is expected because our VPN uses full tunneling. Because the underlying IP address used for the SSL changes, there is no way to circumvent this by clearing any sort of cache. You have to restart your browser or maybe logout and log back in.