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Forum Discussion
Orbi VPN does not change IP
I've looked through many threads regarding this topic but none of the threads have a final answer; they're all abandoned. I have set up DDNS (NoIP.com), and set up VPN with the "all internet and...
I do not trust the chicken. Please try again with a different web site.
I use OpenVPN to administer two Orbi systems. I did the test you described:
- Disconnect phone from WiFi to use cellular data
- Open Hot Spot on phone
- Connect laptop to Hot Spot and use IPChiken to learn IP address of phone
- Changed laptop to OpenVPN connected to my home Orbi.
- IPChik says the public IP address remains the same! (WTF???)
- Changed to whatismyipaddress.com. NOW my public IP is the same as my home Orbi.
- I am one cynical old bugger, but I have a suspicion that the chicken is reading out of browser cache, has left a cookie, or something. Two requests from the same browser a few minutes apart. What could have changed???
This use of OpenVPN to appear to be somewhere else is well known. Aside from bandwidth/latency issues it should work.
I have no apples, so my experiment was done using Windows.
Can you give this another try and check the public IP against several test sites?
Yep, I actually did check with both whatsmyip and ipchicken, just was too lazy to type. And it doesn't read the cache because as soon as I switch the connection from tether back to my home's wifi, Ipchicken and whatsmyip changed immediately, not minutes apart, but immediately as soon as i hit refresh.
The ultimate litmus test was giving the configs to my family overseas to see if they can watch the shows. They were blocked due to geolocation.
Albeit this is on a mac and via TunnelBlick. I've seen in other threads that other ppl have success with the confs on mobile/windows, too bad I need it to work on a mac.
Sorry for blaming the chicken, although it looked strange to me.
The default OpenVPN for Windows is a tun connection. For everything else, it is a tap connection. I have no idea what tunnelblik assumes. There are tons of web sites explaining the difference between them, pros and cons, etc.
Have done some more testing. Have now verified that Orbi OpenVPN will direct ordinary web requests through the router WAN port which will give them the public IP of the router. Verified by whatismyip.com, nordvpn.com, and the IPchiken:
- Windows 10
- Mint Linux
- Android phone
I notice that MacOS recommends tunnelblick, which iPad and iPhone use OpenVPN from the app store. Is the failure you are observing on both platforms or only one?
I've only tride MacOS, didn't try OpenVPN on phones/ipads. Although I did see some ppl have success on iPhones and stuff.
I have no idea what TAP/TUN are so I'll go read more about it. But from my perspective due to my lack of VPN-know-how, I'm at the mercy of the config file that the Orbi site produces. And the Mac conf files it exports for some reason won't get accepted by OpenVPN; only TunnelBlick accepts it. Here is how it looks like:
client
dev tap
proto udp
sndbuf 393216
rcvbuf 393216
push "sndbuf 393216"
push "rcvbuf 393216"
remote xxxxxxx.ddns.net xxxresolv-retry infinite
nobind
persist-key
persist-tun
ca ca.crt
cert client.crt
key client.key
cipher AES-128-CBC
comp-lzo
verb 0
redirect-gateway def1. <--- I added this line myself from reading TunnelBlick forums. Still didn't change my IP.