Linux Mint Forums / Mint Home Blocked!

[John Gow 17]

The Linux Mint forums and the Mint home page does not allow any of the AirVPN IPs I tried.  This was not always the case. As I use Mint, very inconvenient.
They used to accept sponsorship from one of the major profit VPNs (Private Internet Access I think). I wonder if those IPs are blocked as well?  Really sucks to have one's OS support page not support my chosen VPN.

[monstrocity 31]

Without disconnecting the VPN connection, it's the only solution I've found even though I normally don't use Startpage as a search engine.

 

[EclecticFish 5]

One useful workaround is to use Opera browser with the VPN option enabled. It is not a true VPN but a proxy. The purpose is to appear from an IP address that hopefully is not blocked.

[monstrocity 31]

Startpage anonymous view is also proxied, but doesn't require installing another browser to accomplish the workaround. I did try Tor browser and Brave browser with Tor enabled, but they were also blocked by Sucuri.

[John Gow 17]

I had totally forgot about using Startpage or a proxy to work around this.  Still rather odd they'd blacklist all of airvpn?
Thank you!

Edit:  Startpage couldn't get through either.  I should have checked forums first, apparently this is a old and widespread problem, but I've never been  blocked until now.  Here's the main thread:
 

 

Edited ... by John Gow
update and regret about not joining other thread

[SurprisedItWorks 49]

This sort of thing is why I have two VPNs.  I consider Air my primary but use AzireVPN as secondary, and I've always been able to get through to linuxmint.com on one or the other.  The only sites where I've been shut out on both are some banks and some shopping sites.

I had Air first but added Azire when I wanted to try wireguard in the days before Air yet offered it.  Azire's website is not perfect, and their servers are few, but their servers' uptime and speed have been great via wireguard.  (Haven't tried their OpenVPN service.)

[space5 2]

On 6/7/2023 at 4:22 PM, SurprisedItWorks said:

This sort of thing is why I have two VPNs.  I consider Air my primary but use AzireVPN as secondary

What about mullvad as secondary? What is good about azirevpn?

[SurprisedItWorks 49]

There is an Air forum for discussion of other VPNs, so look there for more, but briefly I favor Azire over Mullvad for high-reliability, fast servers (at least on wireguard) and for a serious attitude toward security in how servers are set up.

Azire's main downside is its small server network. And sometimes Azire feels like it's a hobby project with a tiny staff.  Their age is similar to Air's though. They are survivors. 

When I use Mullvad I seem to need frequent server changes to keep things moving.  Mullvad is also beginning to get a bit publicly prominent for my taste.  Their recent abrupt cessation of port forwarding was also a bit of a shocker. Makes me glad I never went through the effort to set it up with them!  When I invest configuration effort, I expect some continuity.

Air is still so far above all these others though. Easy primary choice. The choice of a secondary VPN is really a secondary matter.  (Bad pun alert!)  Always good to have backup though, and adding a second provider is probably best for anyone needing partition-of-trust setups like double hops.