Posts by zomboided

It means the definitions it uses are out of date and I don’t have the new ones. You can use it and if it works for you, great, otherwise you’ll have to use the User Defined option with definitions that you download from your chosen provider

deepee I think they've changed since I did the repo, for sure, I can see this in the emby repo going back a couple releases. So it does look like this is something that can be fixed prior to 20.0

I'm not sure that repos auto update though so it might need a new repo to be installed by the user which is a bit rubbish

Don't see this on the Windows version of Kodi 19. Haven't updated any of my Pis to check this but will have a look when I get there.

If you start and stop openvpn outside of VPN Mgr then you’ll probably see some conflict as VPN Mgr tries to restart openvpn if it sees it go away. You should choose one way or another of controlling openvpn but definitely not both.

VPN Mgr has an API which can be called from scripts allowing some external control as well as from within Kodi. It’s documented on the wiki.

The userdata directory is for the user to put stuff. New files get downloaded there, along with user overrides being stored.

Files are copied to /addon/service.vpn.manager/UserDefined (I think) to be used. I can't exactly remember what triggers the copy but it's probably the validation of the connection. A bunch of other stuff gets updated/copied at the same time too.

You'll probably need to do your downloading, update the active connection, then restart it to take effect. There might be cases where it reverts any updates you've made as anything in the addon directory is fair game for updating with no easy way to disable this.

But VPN Mgr does what you're doing anyway for Nord - it's uses the API (providing the logon to the API works....) to go and fetch the recommended server during connection. It doesn't use static definitions like other providers.

You can see if openvpn is a running task using ps. VPN Mgr will manage the stopping and starting of that task.

It'll also redirect the output to a log (/run/openvpn.log maybe?), but I think the log will hang around even after the task dies so just looking for the existence of the log is not enough.

7.0.1 has the fix mentioned above. I tried it on TwisterOS, which has the older pidof behaviour, and @ciclista71 has tested it on a new LE build which I have not installed myself and it seems to work on both. Any issues, post them up.

That's some good work debugging, thanks! I'm running Pi3s most everywhere and haven't been brave enough to upgrade to the new release. Here's the Python 2 behaviour, which is different.

>>> import os
>>> os.system("pidof openvpn")
256
>>> pid=os.system("pidof openvpn")
>>> print pid
256

I think the latest version of the add-on requires Python 3, so I think your proposal should work. I'm gonna do some testing in a non-LE environment and see if it's true for 'all' Linux platforms before making the change though. Thanks again.

Do you only get the flood of messages when you're running openvpn?

As I said to you on github, this isn't something the add-on is knowingly doing, but you could eliminate openvpn logging by just invaliding all connections or turning off connect on boot.

This is good feedback to share, thanks. The Nord support uses their API, to which I no longer have access to the documentation, so nothing here is getting fixed. I think I've seen issues wtih :

Multi-factor authentication being enabled

"Weird" symbols in the password

And now password length.

The advice above is good if you want to connect.

Share the import log. The wizard should spot the files and ensure the path is correct.

Also share the resulting ovpn file.

You need to get an ovpn file from Express VPN, it will have things in you need and those things will be extracted. I'm not a subscriber so I can't describe where or how Express offer this download.

I’ve pushed v7.0.0 to the repo now for those using Matrix. I left the older 6.4.3 version on there too for those using older versions of Kodi but I honestly haven’t tested if it can still be installed.

If you’re not on Matrix you'll see a message that 7.0.0 doesn’t meet the pre reqs and it’ll not upgrade. This is working as designed. 7.0.0 needs Python 3 which only Matrix has

See previous page/the posts directly before yours, you need 6.9.3, which you'll need to get from github

That log, from boot shows that ovpn can't connect because it can't resolve the names, eg

2021-08-29 19:38:51.549 T:927 INFO <general>: Sun Aug 29 19:38:10 2021 RESOLVE: Cannot resolve host address: australia-sydney-2-ca-version-2.expressnetw.com:1195 (Name or service not known)

I can ping australia-sydney-2-ca-version-2.expressnetw.com from my laptop so it suggests an issue with your network. Also from the log it even looks like other addons you have are failing because there's no DNS resolution. I'm not going to be able to tell you why your network is broken, just that VPN Mgr can't connect because the network is not there.

You might try running without a VPN see if the same thing happens. Although you kind of are in the log that you shared because it doesn't appear to even connect.

Read the first post, it tells you about getting logs.

Quote from GarnR1

Hi everyone,

Sorry I'm having to come back to this forum but I seem to be having an issue that crops up every so often. The problem is basically while connected to the network via ethernet or wlan the internet connection stops working. A dead giveaway is the time is usually incorrect and "VPN Manager" cannot connect. The RPI is accessible via the network but there is no internet connection. The only way to fix it is try disable wan/lan, reset and sometimes it will kick back into life, sometimes it wont.

This happens every so often and most of the time it works but when it goes down it can be days before I can get it going again by trying the above steps. Also of note is this happens on three separate RPI4's at 2 different locations. Any help would be super appreciated.

My money would be on your VPN provider killing connections that aren't being used. You should look at whether your ovpn file has a keep alive or ping setting. If the openvpn executable hasn't been killed then it'll still look like it's running and not try to reconnect (even tho you have no path to the provider).

Of course if you'd provided more diagnostic than 'my internet connection is not working' then we could provide a more informed answer...

The VPN changes the IP address of your box as viewed by external services to your network. When the VPN is disabled, your previous IP address returns. This is working exactly as designed from your description.

FWIW, in the past I've used Bitvise SSH with port forwarding to get music streaming working outside of my network. I spent a bunch of time thinking about what I wanted to make available externally and how to do it based on my own network infrastructure and what I was targetting. I did not want to open up ports to make it generally available, or worse punch holes in my network generally.