Verifying Re-Direct of Traffic in "Road Warrior" connection

[AgentWorm]

I have established a tunneled openvpn connection from my laptop in coffee houses & libraries to my desktop through my NAT router on my home network. I can ping both ways. I can browse using Firefox et al. My question is: how can I verify that browser traffic is in fact moving thorough my secure vpn and not the local network connection? Thanks for any light you can shed...

NB: Ubuntu Lucid LTS on both machines, Tomato firmware router.

[janjust]

go to http://whatismyip.com and check your IP - it should be the IP address of your home router

[AgentWorm]

Thanks so much for your reply. I had done this, and just as I feared, I'm seeing a strange IP there...presumably the hot spot's. Your reply confirms my suspicions.

Sigh. Back to the forums. I guess I'll just use the teeny Smartphone interfaces and rely on CDMA anonymity and SSH for now.

[AgentWorm]

I'm wondering if the issue could be the "login capture" imposed by libraries and coffeehouses that requires browser interaction/initiation of a local session of some sort to allow internet access. How does OpenVPN circumvent or mask this?

[janjust]

it doesn't.
if you need to go to a website first (like most hotel wifi systems also require) then simply go to google.com or whatever, wait for the internet connection to become active and THEN start the openvpn connection. I guess you could try to do this automagically using an "up" script in openvpn, but I don't think it'd be worth the hassle.