MacOS – Is it possible to have per-app network/vpn/proxy settings

In general, the network settings are global, and apply to the whole machine, including all applications.

VPNs will work great to access machines on a known network (eg: 192.168.1.x = home, 10.1.1.x = work via VPN)

What kind of VPN is it? It's possible that the VPN has grabbed the default route, meaning that all network traffic that isn't on your local network will go via the VPN.

You can run netstat -nr in Terminal to see your routing table.

You can use sudo route change default 10.1.1.1 to change the default route to your local network's router (eg 10.1.1.1 for me) so that it will route external connections. Connections to your VPN network should still go through the VPN.

Hopefully this helps!

I have the same issue. When I use a proxy.pac file certain applications fail to pick up the settings. Among these are:

• Firefox
• Chrome
• Java apps (like eclipse)

Some apps that do work with the pac file are:

• Safari
• Skype
• Adium
• Evernote

What I have found though, is that when I manually add a proxy server to the system preferences it is picked up by all applications. So something in the pac handling is broken. Maybe old/new APIs in Lion?