No internet (on mobile) via Hotspot (on laptop) after connecting to L2TP VPN (on laptop)

Question

am running Windows 8.1; I've created a WiFi Hotspot on my laptop (to connect my cell phone) to internet as well; and shared the Ethernet connection so that it works for WiFi Hotspot as well.

Recently, I configured a L2TP VPN connection on one of my remote ubuntu servers and it works great on my laptop.

However, the WiFi Hotspot still works for mobile but on my mobile phone I can't browser websites. However, I can access the websites on my mobile phone which are hosted on the server (on which i've created the VPN server) which means it seems it joins it as a local network and access its websites etc but not any others e.g. yahoo.com

PS: I tried to change the DNS for my WiFi connection on my mobile phone to use Google's DNS. But that didn't help.

I tried disabling windows firewall that didn't help either.

Can anyone help me find out what it could be.

Answer 1

This is normal behaviour and by design. On Windows you've shared the Ethernet connection. When you connect to a VPN, the VPN becomes your default connection and your Ethernet connection is effectively disabled.

You can't access the internet or provide hotspot functions through a disabled interface, and you have not shared the VPN interface so your hotspot can't use that either.