For those of you that don’t know, your router (sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly also referred to as a “modem”) is your devices’ gateway to the internet. Now, normally, the first “stop” (called “hop”, but it rhymes, so that’s okay) before your internet goes out into the world wide web to fetch whatever you where looking for 🤐 is your ISP (the company to which you pay money in order to “have internet”). Some people, like myself, don’t want my ISP to know what I’m doing on the world wide web, because I’m worried I’ll give them a heart attack 🤞 So in order to spare them that suffering, I let my router “scramble” all the information going out from and coming in to my home. I also pay money to another company that “de-scrambles” the information, so that it can actually interact with the world wide web (look for images, play video streams, chat, whathaveyou). These companies, often referred to as VPNs, often let you choose which one of their computers (called “servers”) you send your scrambled information to, because sometimes you want it to appear as though you were in a different place than you actually are. Sometimes the speed of “your internet” is important, in which case you want to choose one of their computers that are closest to your actual location. And once you have chosen, you very often can be done with it and never touch it again. Which is what I did. And it worked flawlessly for FIVE YEARS.
Until today.
I come home work, connect to my WiFi and I have no internet. I troubleshoot like crazy. I go through my physical connections (cables, AC/DC power adapters, the internet cable plugs in the walls, etc), the interconnection between my various devices (phone to router, computer to router, etc), the software settings within the router… I even try downgrading the operating system of the router and my access points. God knows how long I spent doing this.
Then it hit me: let’s check if my VPN has announced anything on their blog! Maybe that specific computer of theirs to which I’m sending my internet is out of order? And that was exactly it. I simply chose another computer of theirs and badabing badabom.
🫠
Modem is modulator demodulator, not a ‘hop’ but an interface
It gets confusing because people use these names interchangeably, but it’s worth it to know where layer 2 becomes layer 3, through transport, session and encryption to troubleshoot issues
“Hop” is connected to “ISP” in my sentence. But it’s quite long and trying to be unnecessarily funny, so, that’s okay.
OpenWrt plus a watchdog script (cron job checking connectivity, e.g., ping through the tunnel, and switching peer endpoints on failure) would work for non bread protein uses to keep you online for another 5 years.
If you’re not Gluetun intolerant, you could arrange it to retry other servers in other countries automatically and save you the trouble.
you very often can be done with it and never touch it again
That’s not my experience. I often keep the same country as my VPN (Sweden), but if I ever need to watch a YouTube video (once a week) I have to switch to another country (e.g. Albania because Google want me to log in which I won’t do if I’m still in Sweden), or go back to using the French servers if I want to access my bank accounts.
That’s confusing but I hope you understood.
That wasn’t confusing at all! I have made a list of a few servers/peers so that I can switch easily if I ever have to, but I never had to fiddle with it for five years, probably because I barely use it for anything other than downloading and uploading Linux ISOs.
You should be able to set up forwarding rules to route YouTube to a different VPN, although I guess most home routers can’t have multiple tunnels.
Yeah one time a good 20-30 minutes was spent between me and another tech guy trying to figure out why the external drive wasn’t reading. After doing all the usb driver things it turned out that we hadn’t switched it on.
LOL. Yeah, I mean, you’d like to think that only happens on The IT Crowd, but nope. Shit happens. 😂
To be fair, external drives with power switches? I don’t know… How common are they? 🫣 I’d say it’s a design fault rather than your “miss”.
Does your VPN provider have the option to connect to a hostname vs IP-address?
If not, depending on the router, you might be able to set up a backup tunnel to prevent this.
My latest router rageout was when I was trying to set up a VLAN on my wireless AP for IoT. I did something and lost connection to my AP. I was able to get it reset, but I made the mistake of clearing the config which basically wiped the OS. Had to do an OTA OS reinstall, which was luckily an option.
Still haven’t gotten VLANs working on a virtual AP yet. Running enterprise network hardware can be a bitch if it’s been over 15 since your CCNA training and your IT career didn’t involve networking work until recently (moved to cyber security)
Good question! They do provide the domain names of their servers too, but I have only every tried to enter the endpoint IP.
My router does allow to have several peers enables concurrently, but I haven’t read the manual of OpenWRT thoroughly enough to know how it chooses which one to connect to. Whether it’s random, or by ping/latency or something else.
I’m not familiar enough with OpenWRT, but I think there should be a way to do it. I know that in Mikrotik (what I use) you can set up scripts to test the connection and make changes based on the result.
ha, kids
