Posts by zomboided

Quote from Zboi

SOOOOOO, after receiving a notice from my ISP that I need to stop accessing UK content or legal action will occur, I got a VPN. ProtonVPN. (And yes, the free plan, as I am a broke person. The free plan does not include the config files, sadly) Included with my account is an OpenVPN account login. Now, I'm not a noob when it comes to kodi, but I cannot figure out how to use an OpenVPN account with either the OpenVPN extension or the Manager for OpenVPN. And I did Google it, and just got back crap that doesn't help. SO I am asking you many people of this forum, How do I do use my OpenVPN account detail given to me by ProtonVPN on my Raspberry Pi 3B+ running Libreelec 9.1.002 ? I was told to move this here by someone on a different forum.

I'm guessing the alternative they're offering you is to use their software to connect. VPN Mgr uses the config files that they're not giving you so that it can connect and manage the connection itself. It doesn't have a way of interacting with third party software to do this.

So your choices are : sell a kidney and pay for a VPN that does give you config files; or run Kodi in an environment where you can also run their software, but accept that you need to manage the connection yourself (so no connected only when needed in Kodi).

Quote from robmcc83

Hi,

Thanks for your amazing add-on which makes things so much easier but I just have one question.

Why do only a handful of add-ons show in the exclude list within the options of VPN manager.

I'm trying to get sonarr to be accessible outside of my home network.

If I turn the VPN off then I can access it easily but with the VPN on I cannot do this.

So I was wanting to exclude this add-on but it doesn't show up.

The only add-ons that show up are YouTube and skin helper service but I have quite a few more add-ons installed other than them.

Thanks

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The list is all of those defined as an xbmc.python.pluginsource, which translates as music, picture, video and program addons. More info here.

This generally excludes all background processes, such as scripts because filtering works by detecting whether an addon window is active (and background processes have no addon window).

What the addon doesn't do is filter the VPN traffic by addon, which is what I think you're asking for. Either the VPN is on or off...it can't be on for some addons and simultaniously off for others.

I personally don't use sonarr, but have a similar issue in accessing TVheadend when i'm outside of my network. I had concluded that my two choices were SSH with port forwarding (but I can't work out how to get that to work with my iPhone), or running my own VPN server. I think the latter option would work with the Kodi box still connected to a VPN but due to my lethargy I've not tried this theory yet.

I agree the settings don't show the filtering on the settings page, that's a GUI/settings change in Kodi. If you go into the dialog, the filtered addons are shown as selected from previously. And the actual filtering/changing connection is still working just fine for me though (similar set up to you)

Nord is controlled via their api, they determine the server to use based on the country selected. If you want to use a specific country you can create your own ovpn file and connect directly to that server

You can see If the vpn is connected by looking at the ip table or checking running processes via the command line. Or you can check whether it’s connected within the addon menu

Ok I’ll look at it in a week or so, busy doing nothing on holiday right now

awiouy, got it, thanks for the fix, appreciate it. Will push out an update after I've tested it on my machine.

Cert got updated just now for TorGuard as they changed it recently. You shoudl see the update somewhen in the next day.

I had been told by a mate some months ago that Nord was ok for accessing content in the UK from the US. Maybe the BBC have blocked the Nord servers - this is what normally happens. I had thought Nord were pretty good at rotating their servers to work around these blocks. It would be worth having a conversation with their support team and see what they say.

You don’t need to write a python script, you can just use systemd to automatically restart it. But If there’s a problem with your provider, then this might not work reliably.

My addon takes the python script approach, also stopping any media as well. And you can specify how often it checks from some small number of seconds. This approach is a balance between the CPU effort of checking a running task vs playing media. I found that on the Pi this would mess with playing more intensive media (like 10GB+ higher bit rate movies, etc)

This isn’t a kill switch tho. A kill switch will block regular traffic over anything that’s not the VPN so that if the VPN fails, nothing can flow ever. This block will be removed when the VPN is disconnected. I think the only way to achieve this is by using the openvpn up and down scripts to manipulate the IP table.

What approach you take really depends on how “protected” you want to be with your VPN and why you’re using it (avoid that rabbit hole on this forum...)

Quote from frank1970

Hi Zom,

I am not going crazy! But angry!

Tried the VPN via my phone as wifi access point and no problem at all!

I called ISP Ziggo, after a long investigation they told me that the 2 raspberry pi's are blacklisted! No reason why and no way to get off the blacklist. :(((((

Must be a MAC address block in the router.

Greetings,

Frank

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That's really poor. How come it worked for Raspbian though, or was that on a different Pi?

No, I never worked out how to do it universally. You can stop the stream if the VPN disconnects but this isn’t immediate.

Or you can add something to the ovpn files to mess with the ip table. I don’t know what that something would be tho

I’ve not changed PIA for ages, and the fact it works ok on 17 makes me think it’s not related

to the PIA ovpn files changing.

You could download a current PIA ovpn file and start it manually via the command line.

If this has the same issue then it’s not the addon. If it doesn’t I’ll look at the ovpn files when I’m in front of a computer but that won’t be for a few days.

I pushed out 6.2.0 which adds some minor stuff to display the VPN server name in use (if you care about that sort of thing) and fix to a weird connection bug. Only it also introduced a bug where it'd crash if you connect before boot.

Fix for that is in 6.2.1, should update automatically via the repo, but if not just reinstall it.

Thanks for the info. I definitely don’t want to spend time debugging problems with nightly builds. Reporting issues to Milhouse is definitely the right thing to do. Happy to look at issues with any regular builds

NordVPN supported me integrated with them by giving me access to their API and talking through how it worked. The decided that by country, and then using the least loaded in the country was the right approach (which for video streaming, I totally agree with). It also works with their constantly changing server IPs as everything is accessed dynamically.

If you're wanting to use one of their special servers, then you can get the address of the server and create the ovpn file. You might do this by letting NordVPN connect, then looking in .../kodi/addons/service.vpn.manager/NordVPN/ to get a working ovpn. You might need the other files referenced by it too, such as the certs and password files, and then shove them all into the import wizard.

Thanks for providing decent debug. I think you’re trusting the import to do the right thing, which it doesn’t. You already found and commented on that github issue. If you avoid using the tagging (ie #PATH), and you edit the ovpn after import to contain the absolute path to the pass file, this might solve the problem.

I can’t remember how this code works as it’s been ages since I looked and I don’t anticipate having enough free time to look at this any time soon to remind myself/provide a fix

These have been happening since Kodi 18 and the rewrite of settings. No idea how to fix it because I couldn't find any documentation on how settings should now be structured (to be fair, i haven't looked recently). Turn off debug is the only way to fix.

The wizard doesn’t support pass protected keys, there’s a github issue open to fix it but I’ve not done it. You can investigate how to supply a file with the password in and reference that and manually change the ovpn files. Or you can turn off the requirement for pass protected keys. Dunno if the second option is possible as I don’t run PiVPN