Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Technology and Society

VPN Routers

10 Comments

OK, now that I’m back on the air, I’m thinking that with ExpressVPN’s limit of five simultaneous devices (at least for the low-cost plan), I should use it for mobile devices, and do something else at home. I’d like to install it on the Netgear Orbi mesh, but ExpressVPN doesn’t support it, and it might not have enough processing power to do all that encryption anyway. But I can pick this up for $140 bucks. Could I just put that downstream from my cable modem, and feed the Orbi with it for the home wifi, freeing up my ExpressVPN account for phones, laptops and tablets? It might also allow me to access my home machines remotely, except I don’t think I have static IP.

[Update a few minutes later]

Or this one looks like an even better deal, though it might not be as easy to set up.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Internet Problems

27 Comments

I seem to have lost the ethernet connection to my desktop. There is nothing to indicate a problem; Fedora tells me it’s connected, but I can’t ping anything. Not sure how to troubleshoot. I’ve tried switching cables, but it doesn’t help. But I know that there’s no problem with the router, because wireless is up (I’m typing this from my notebook).

(Monday-morning update)

Still haven’t solved it, but on a flight to Denver for suborbital researchers conference, so won’t get to it until Thursday.

[Thursday-morning update]

It’s clearly a weird DNS problem. I can ping Google’s IP, but I cannot ping google.com. I can ping 8.8.8.8, but when I manually set that as DNS, it still doesn’t work.

I tried plugging directly into the router instead of the Orbi, with same results.

I have not changed anything in the configuration; it had been working fine for many months as it was set up, with the router feeding the main Orbi via ethernet, and the Orbi providing both ethernet and wifi to my desktop and the house. But for some reason, I woke up almost a week ago, and the desktop had no Internet.

[Bumped]

[Afternoon update]

Well, this is fun. It’s clearly a software issue.

I just pulled the SSD off my laptop and booted the desktop from it, and it now works. I’m suspecting that it has something to do with expressvpn. Since I installed it, I don’t have Internet until I connect it. But on the machine that has problems, I couldn’t connect, so I removed it, but it didn’t solve the problem. There must be some setting that doesn’t allow the machine to do DNS without expressvpn, which somehow went haywire last week.

I’m wondering if the best solution would be to just install a clean version of Fedora 31 (I’m currently using 30) on either the old SSD, or a new one.

[Friday update]

OK, it turned out that ExpressVPN was locking out the Internet when it wasn’t connected (for my “safety”), which meant that if something went wrong with the connection, it made it impossible to reconnect to ExpressVPN, or the Internet. After spending several hours this morning on chat with someone at ExpressVPN, and wasting my time going down various rabbit holes, I finally found someone who told me to just blow away /etc/resolv.conf, and reconnect, which gave me Internet again.

I did manage to convey that they had some serious bad practices that resulted in this frustration, and gave them some recommendations.

  1. Let the icon tell me whether I have a good connection. Ever since I installed the expressvpn package, it always has a question mark on it, whether it is connected or not.
  2. Have an autoconnect that actually works on login, rather than having to go into shell each time and manually connect.
  3. Provide an ability to override the lock (with a warning) rather than simply lock it when ExpressVPN isn’t connected.

They said they’d try to incorporate into the next version.