I have created a branch office bridge that works great using PPTP and EOIP. I would like all traffic at the branch office that is not a destination in the 192.168.0.0/16 network be routed through the local internet connection. The goal is to allow the localized workstations to communicate with the remote server over the bridge but all other traffic use the localized internet connection.
I have tried using Bridge Filters and Bridge NAT rules with no luck. I may be on the right path but cannot see the forest for the trees.
Is there any reason you explicitly need both networks on the same broadcast domain? If not, I highly suggest removing the EoIP bridge and putting the branch office on their own subnet, then just add static routes on both ends to send the appropriate traffic over the PPTP Tunnel. You can either have the Mikrotik hand out DHCP, or set the mikrotik for DHCP relay to your primary DHCP server.
Removing chatty broadcast traffic from the link should help performance, as well as reducing overhead, since you no longer have a tunnel in a tunnel. Since only the static routes will transfer over the PPTP tunnel, both sides will use their local internet connection for all other traffic.
I actually have two offices, one existing and one being set up. Both have a single PC and a VoIP Phone behind a RB750GL and connecting to a RB493G at a network center. The existing office is set up using PPTP and everything is just routed and it works great. The question is why do I want to use EoIP? It was more of an experiment if anything as well as a way to expand my understanding of some of the functions I really never use in everyday configurations. Based of both comments so far, this may be a soon to be aborted experiment.
Honestly, the EoIP connection was allowing me to browse large folder contents on the remote Windows Server quicker that the PPTP connection but that may be some other overhead as I have not had much time to test it further. One big annoyance is the DHCP coming from the Windows Server is not adding the clients to the database right away and I have had duplicate IP assignments reported. I have not tried to use DHCP Relay to resolve that as I just set the two devices static to play. The network is small right now but is expected to add additional remote offices in the near future.
The more I think about this, I am going to go back to PPTP and route all traffic because I will also have a printer at each site location that will need to be accessible from the computers in the other offices but at the same time this printer will live on the local network of the remote office, not the PPTP or EoIP network.
Thank you both for chiming in on this. If you have any other suggestions to do things differently or to compel me to stay with the EoIP configuration, I am all ears…