PLEASE Help me stay with AirVPN!

[Terry Stanford 11]

This is a last ditch attempt to find a solution to problems I am having before I will be forced to leave AirVPN, which I REALLY do not want to have to do.

I have had this issue for many months. Support appears to have given up and can't help. I am posting this in case any users have suggestions or maybe have suffered the same thing and found a way around the problem.

I am running Mac OSX Mojave (10.14.6), and Eddie V2.20. My hard drive has encryption on it and I am running two user accounts. Eddie only runs in one of those accounts, but both accounts benefit from the VPN connection as the main account is always logged in first.

Most times I leave my machine for more than an hour or two (sometimes only 20 minutes but it happens more often after long periods away) I return to the desk, unlock the machine, and see Eddie has disconnected. Today for example it did it and I had 1,139 notifications from Eddie, attempts to reconnect (which fail). Eddie will not reconnect after I unlock the machine, and it freezes too. It then shows an error which reads:

"Unexpected crash of elevated helper: Connection timed out."

If i force quit the app (which I have to), and then run it again, it never manages to "obtain elevated privileges" again. Every time giving an error "failed to obtain elevated privileges". Even if log the user out, and log in again (which I would think should reset the privileges thing), it still fails to obtain privileges. The only cure is to reboot the whole machine. This is a huge pain, as I have lots of programs running in both user accounts and I have to enter lots of passwords to unlock disk, then user accounts, then my backup drives which are encrypted. The whole process usually costs me 30-45 minutes EVERY time I sit back down at my machine. It's costing me so much time, I simply can't tolerate it any longer.

I opened a support ticket and sent all logs etc. Support has no ideas and can't help, other than to suggest I use Hummingbird which is no good for me. I need GUI, I am not a CLI competent person and I need to change IP many times each day so going to CLI every time would be a real pain and just not viable. I am now faced with uninstalling Eddie and going over to another VPN provider. I really hate the thought of doing that, but I have no choice now.
Before I do that, does anyone have any ideas?

I have tried changing many preferences in Eddie, changed it to install a launch daemon to obtain privileges (avoiding need for password when starting Eddie), this makes no difference. I have tried every other setting adjustment I can see and again, no solution found. Grateful for any ideas before I leave what I still believe is by far the most trustworthy VPN team on earth. :(

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

This is the fourth or so thread by you with this exact problem. If in the other threads you didn't get a quality answer that satisfies you, and if even the Lord (as in, support) doesn't have an idea, the only real thing you can do is sort out what does not work for you. Sometimes you gotta go one step back (leave the most trustworthy VPN team on Earth) to keep going forward, it is what it is.

Edited ... by OpenSourcerer
Remove quote easily taken for an insult

[dIecbasC 38]

Why does it disconnect? Knowing the cause will help identify a solution. Randomly clicking on buttons without knowing your tackling the root cause is not likely to result in a positive outcome. 
Depending on why Eddie is disconnecting may indicate other clients will behave similarly. 
 

[Terry Stanford 11]

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[Terry Stanford 11]

On 6/20/2021 at 5:13 AM, dIecbasC said:

Why does it disconnect? Knowing the cause will help identify a solution. Randomly clicking on buttons without knowing your tackling the root cause is not likely to result in a positive outcome. 
Depending on why Eddie is disconnecting may indicate other clients will behave similarly. 
 

Nobody is "randomly clicking on buttons". When I said I have tried every setting adjustment, i didn't say (or mean) "randomly".

As explained in my last post, it appears that the problem is with Eddie regaining elevated privileges after the machine has been in standby/sleep mode.
You asked why it disconnects, I have asked this on the forum before (as the imbecile above will attest to I am sure) and was told it is a SECURITY FEATURE! I even asked if it could be stopped, I don;t mind my machine staying connected while it's in sleep mode, but I received sensible advice suggesting that it really is best if it disconnects as it's a security risk to leave connections open while I am not at the machine. That makes sense and I went along with that ever since. So it appears the answer to your question as to why it disconnects is, because it's DESIGNED to!! That's what I was told anyway!

 

[Staff 9972]

@Terry Stanford

Hello!

We just made sure that support team really passed the ticket to Eddie developer for additional investigation and we see that they did so on 2021-05-06. Unfortunately it seems that the issue could not be reproduced and therefore the bug you reported is still there and can't be found.
 

Quote

So it appears the answer to your question as to why it disconnects is, because it's DESIGNED to!! That's what I was told anyway!

Wait, do not twist words and basic meaning. You were told that when your Mac turns off the physical network interface it is unavoidable that a VPN connection is lost, because it's the physical connection to the Internet that gets lost, obviously.

That said, we do understand your anger and frustration because your reports show a substantial range of malfunctions which would irritate anybody. Sadly the main problem (for any software) in such cases is when a malfunction is reported and nobody in the development team manages to reproduce it, no matter how they try. When a malfunction is invisible (not reproducible) on development and testing systems, you have no idea where to search for the bug(s) causing it.

We would like to propose you something alternative which we see the support team did not: would you like to test Hummingbird and check what happens under the same conditions, in your Mojave system? Since when your problems started, a new and more efficient Hummingbird version has been released, and it runs (for throughput) a lot faster than the previous version as well as OpenVPN 2.

About Hummingbird:
https://airvpn.org/hummingbird/readme/

Yes we know, you will not have a GUI, but it would be a test which might provide some clue by comparison, and who knows, maybe Hummingbird will be less problematic than Eddie in your system.

Kind regards
 

[Terry Stanford 11]

20 hours ago, Staff said:

@Terry Stanford

Wait, do not twist words and basic meaning. You were told that when your Mac turns off the physical network interface it is unavoidable that a VPN connection is lost, because it's the physical connection to the Internet that gets lost, obviously.
 

I have not "twisted" any words. I had it explained (very generously) by experts on here (not sure who but I could find if needed, maybe staff but not sure) how it is better to let it auto disconnect for security reasons, as my machine would be vulnerable otherwise. That made sense, and I accepted this good advice. I didn't twist or even mis-quote those words, it was exactly what I was told. MAYBE they meant that Mac does it by default rather than Eddie, that's indeed possible, but from memory it sounded like Eddie was doing it to protect me. I was happy with that. If it could be over-ridden, just for testing purposes, that might be worthwhile.
 

20 hours ago, Staff said:

we do understand your anger and frustration because your reports show a substantial range of malfunctions

Please note, no anger, frustration yes, but polite at all times as I know it's nobody's fault and I wanted a solution (leaving AirVPN is not something I want to do, it's a very very last resort)

Hummingbird - The lack of GUI unfortunately makes it no use as a permanent solution, but I could certainly install it for testing purposes if you think that may help rule things in/out. Do my Eddie logs not help provide detail on what's causing the issue? I could grab fresh logs if so. Basically the problems only ever happen after a system standby, my gut feeling (not a lot of use I know) is that its' related to the password. When I first boot the system, everything unlocks, but after a sleep, it seems like certain things are not being unlocked fully, or Eddie can't get access to what it needs (launchd?) to get itself connected again. I suspect Hummingbird would work fine and not suffer from this problem, I can confirm that but I bet it would be the case. I have used other VPN apps which don't suffer from this problem after sleep mode, so it appears to be an Eddie-Mojave issue. I understand if the dev can't see it with his/her own eyes, there's little they can do.

Worst case I could just use another VPN for now (still not nice for me but not the end of the world) and keep an eye out for an Eddie update, then I could try it again and see if it resolves itself.

thanks

[Staff 9972]

@Terry Stanford

Hello!

Quote

I have not "twisted" any words. I had it explained (very generously) by experts on here (not sure who but I could find if needed, maybe staff but not sure) how it is better to let it auto disconnect for security reasons, as my machine would be vulnerable otherwise.

That sounds partially wrong, please link us this answer because we can't find it. If it was from a Staff member it needs to be fixed.
 

Quote

Hummingbird - The lack of GUI unfortunately makes it no use as a permanent solution, but I could certainly install it for testing purposes if you think that may help rule things in/out

We do. Please keep us informed, or inform the support team, as you prefer.

Kind regards



 

[Terry Stanford 11]

4 hours ago, Staff said:

That sounds partially wrong, please link us this answer because we can't find it. If it was from a Staff member it needs to be fixed.

Thanks. It may not have been a staff member, my memory says it was someone I could certainly trust regarding technical ability so maybe Nadre or giganerd, but I am guessing, it was a good while ago and may have been on my old account. I have looked quickly and can't find it myself either, but I am 100% certain someone said it, not necessarily staff though. I will drop you a link if/when I find it!
Basically the conversation began with me asking if I could make Eddie stay connected even when machine locked, the reply said (paraphrasing) 'that's a security risk, you dont want to do that', and I believe they also briefly explained how/why it happens. I then dropped the idea for security reasons. I have found another thread where MadRat (mac user) mentioned turning off "put hard disks to sleep when possible". I have (since then) set up a new machine and I just checked and I have that ticked again, so I have unticked that and will see if that helps, fingers crosssed.

[flat4 79]

This sounds to me that your have your mac go to sleep or the power settings are set to disconnect from the network.
I believe that in bigsur they change the option to have the mac still be connected while it takes a "power nap"

I know you're on mojave. If CLI scares you why not try tunnelblick its free I believe. I paid for viscosity and it works great I use it for my vpn back to my home but have used it a time or two for airvpn. Just download the config files for the server you want to connect.

Now if you want the fancy stuff that eddie can do...then more logs and research needs to be done on your end.

[Terry Stanford 11]

Thanks. As explained above, I NEED the "fancy stuff", not want. I need to change connections regularly, so it's Eddie, or another VPN app which can do similar.
But I did see an option in system prefs the other day, that "Power Nap" thing, in Mojave. I turned it on, and SO FAR (fingers crossed!) I have not lost connection when the machine slept the last few times. It's early days as this problem is intermittent anyway, but here's hopin!!