TIL: Whitelisting a Local Subnet with NordVPN
After a software update on my Windows machine, I noticed that connecting NordVPN disconnected some mapped network drives on my local network. I came across an undocumented command that allows you to whitelist a subnet:
nordvpn-service.exe whitelist add subnet 192.168.1.0/24
Running this in the Nord directory (probably C:\Program Files\NordVPN) allows for local connections to any address between 192.168.1.0 and 192.168.1.255. However, that doesn’t persist through restarts1.
To avoid having to manually rerun the command, I saved the script below into a nord_whitelist.bat file and set it up to run with a scheduled task on login, with admin privilege and a 3 minute delay to allow NordVPN to initialize first.
@echo off
start "" "C:\Program Files\NordVPN\nordvpn-service.exe" whitelist add subnet 192.168.1.0/24
The @echo off and start "" are just for cleanliness so that the command runs silently in a new window.
The suggestion in the linked Reddit comment to modify a registry path with the whitelist argument didn’t work for me. ↩︎