Major conneciton and client issues

[fiarslightly 1]

Dear all,

 

I’ve been an AirVPN member for a few months now.  Most of this has been a positive experience.  For the last couple of weeks the service has been degrading, and for the last couple of days has become almost unusable.

 

The first, and more minor issue is one I have seen elsewhere on the forum, but I do not remember a resolution to the issue.  It cropped up a few times a month during my first couple of months membership, but is now arriving every 20 minutes to one hour.

 

The primary symptom is that the AIRVPN client reports an upload rate of 28-31 MB/s.  This is absolutely impossible on my connection.  Sometimes the bitrate will return to a more “normal” level, but from the moment it increases dramatically I am unable to get any data through AIRVPN.  I know that my internet connection is working as I can use my phone (connected to the same Wi-Fi, but not using AIRVPN) to access the internet without issue.  I have never had the client visible to observe whether it increases its reported bitrate slowly, or just jumps there.

Does anyone know what causes this issue?  Is there any resolution?

 

 

Much more seriously, and more of an issue over the last week to 10 days, leading up to the service being pretty much unusable for the last two days, is that I seem to be having great difficulty
a) getting a connection to a server that doesn’t disconnect immediately
getting a connection that allows me to transfer data for more than a few minutes after the connection.

 

Yesterday I reinstalled the AIRVPN software.  It seems to have made no difference to the problems. 

What should I do to determine and resolve the problem?  I assume no one else has been having issues over the last few days particularly?

 

In another issue, when I try to disable AIRVPN’s network lock, the client says that it has successfully disabled the lock, but I am still unable to access any web pages.  Is there a process for ensuring that the lock settings have been returned to normal, so that I can at least use the internet normally?

I’m running BitDefender and ZoneAlarm, but have been since before I started using AirVPN.

These issues have cost me significant amounts of time.  My subscription ends in about 7 days.  I cannot renew it if I cannot use the service, which would disappoint me as AirVPN was a fast, good value, well thought out, and capable VPN until these issues started dominating the experience.

 

Thank you to anyone who can provide advice.

 

 

[rickjames 106]

The upload rate from what I've heard is often just incorrect, however it sounds like it happens when you loose connection. So if the connectivity issues get fixed, that upload rate reading may get fixed as well.

The clients network lock feature uses the windows firewall to do it.
Often other firewalls disable the windows firewall, or stop it from correctly functioning. So zonealarm could be causing the network lock issues.

-Pick one firewall, if you plan on using the network lock feature then uninstall zonealarm.

It could also be that the client wasn't shut down properly 'windows crashed or was randomly powered off'.
This could cause the network lock to remain on in some situations.
Resetting the windows firewall to its default settings normally solves this.
Link for the above: https://airvpn.org/topic/14829-can-only-connect-to-the-internet-browser-through-airvpn/

[fiarslightly 1]

Thanks for your advice, RickJames.

 

I’ve assembled a bit of Powershell code to reset my DNS when I have this issue now.

 

Perhaps AirVPN could include some code in their “Deactivate Network Lock” function to check if the adapter’s DNS is still set to AirVPN’s DNS, and if it is, grab a DNS from OpenDNS and set the adapter to use that?

 

This activity should be prompted for, and/or supported by a setting that
a) enables/disables/prompts for this behaviour, and
allows the user to set a preference for either dynamically grabbing a DNS from a website such as OpenDNS, or using a predefined DNS/set of DNSes.

Perhaps this facility could be used to store the user’s original DNS the first time they activate the Network Lock, as suggested elsewhere in this forum?

I’m sure this would be very valuable for users when their computer crashes or is shutdown without waiting for EDDIE to finish faffing around.

 

 

In addition to me original post, my connection issues have been improved mostly, however I am still getting the disconnect issue.  On further observation I see that after EDDIE reports the unreasonable upload rate, and even after it returns to more normal rates, Chrome reports a “DNS_FINISHED_NO_INTERNET” error.  No other internet service can connect after the high rate is reported.

 

I am, once again, persistently having these issues.  I notice that the issues are worse on more full servers, but none of those I have had the issue on are reporting more than 50% usage.

 

Would anyone at AirVPN be interested in viewing some logs?

 

Thanks again to anyone who can help.