Disconnects when using the same Exit Servers on multiple devices on the same network

[WQspsG 0]

Hi,

 

I'm not quite sure if this is the right thread to address this particular issue since I managed to resolve the problem and I'm not entirely sure if it is relevant to anyone else but because it was a pretty annoying experience for me and I want to spare others from this happening to them I decided to share this anyway.

 

I use AirVPN on three devices on mine. As I wanted to use the VPN on the go as well, I decided to use seperate clients and not one central client (like on the router). I generated VPN client configs according to my preferences on all three devices (I chose one country to use Servers from). For weeks I experienced unexplainable connection drops (no internet connection for several minutes) on my computers without any indication in the logs on what could be causing this. After this unpleasant experience and multiple attempts to fix this I finally was able to pinpoint the problem by chance. Apperently when connecting to the same vpn server from multiple devices in the same local network (and presumably when using UDP) the routing messed up and thus whenever my phone did its periodically checks on new messages my computer couldn't connect to the internet. After using different servers (countries) on my various devices everything worked like a charm.

 

Is this expected behaviour? In my understanding the router should still be able to differentiate UDP traffic from various clients? And if this isn't the case, maybe during the config generation the user should be warned about using the same vpn servers on multiple devices.

 

If this is indeed a bug and you need more information on my setup and/or more testing to be done (e.g. haven't tried using TCP or different ports yet. Was just happy that it was finally working properly with my current setup) please feel free to contact me.

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

Is this expected behaviour?

 

Yes.

[kiwi 16]

Hi WQspsG,

 

you get 3 connections max. with your account, but each connection has to run over another server. Multiple connections to one server from your account aren't allowed.

Those are AirVPN rules.

 

Greets

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

Hi WQspsG,

 

you get 3 connections max. with your account, but each connection has to run over another server. Multiple connections to one server from your account aren't allowed.

Those are AirVPN rules.

 

Greets

 

It's not a rule, it's a Law of Technology By connecting to the same server with the same protocol and to the same port your internal IP address is the same. There can't be two devices with the same IP address on any network.

[Staff 9973]

 

Hi WQspsG,

 

you get 3 connections max. with your account, but each connection has to run over another server. Multiple connections to one server from your account aren't allowed.

Those are AirVPN rules.

 

Greets

 

It's not a rule, it's a Law of Technology By connecting to the same server with the same protocol and to the same port your internal IP address is the same. There can't be two devices with the same IP address on any network.

 

 

Hello!

 

It's a quite different technical limitation in our setup, not a big deal anyway.

 

By the way: if you don't need remote port forwarding you can connect multiple devices, from the very same account, to the same server, but on different ports.

 

In this way you will connect to different OpenVPN daemons working on different VP subnets bypassing the limitation. There is also another finesse which will bypass this limitation and will allow multiple connections to the same server and the same port and subnet with the same account on multiple devices, but it will not be implemented in 2017 (plans for this feature, which will require an important change, have not yet a definite deadline).

 

Important: in order to connect to different daemons for sure, consider that different daemons listen to port 53, 80 and 443. If you pick different ports like 28439, you risk to connect to the very same daemon which listens even to other ports.

 

Kind regards

[kiwi 16]

Thanks Staff for your well-founded explanation!

 

Greets