Posts by botafuco

botafuco · LibreELEC and Kodi 17.2 Security Patch botafuco May 26, 2017 at 9:21 AM

Thank you all the people involved in releasing 8.0.2, it's much appreciated!

botafuco · LibreELEC and Kodi 17.2 Security Patch botafuco May 25, 2017 at 10:19 PM

Understood.

In the meantime, what can we do to protect ourselves? Will it be sufficient disabling subtitles and disabling subtitles-download addons?

I suppose that scanning the library for *.zip files and removing them would be prudent as well?

Thanks in advance.

botafuco · VPN Manager for OpenVPN botafuco March 21, 2017 at 10:29 PM

Quote from zomboided

Updates can cause this....I've seen it a couple times especially where the user does something mid update (which can easily take minutes). Cleaning out the userdata directory for an add-on will also wipe the cached settings. I'd say the latter was more likely. If it happens again check out /storage/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/service.vpn.manager and see if settings.xml exists

Ok, thank you for the info, that is clear.

For the time being, I'll disable this addon's auto-update. I'll update it manually, which will prevent me from doing something amid an update

botafuco · VPN Manager for OpenVPN botafuco March 21, 2017 at 6:17 PM

Hi Zomboided,

Last night (20/Mar) I realised that Kodi wasn't connected to the usual (first) VPN, so I went to the addon and I saw that all the settings were reset to default, and no vpn connection was configured (I use 'user defined').

What could have caused this? I see that the addon updated on the 16th, but I'm sure I updated my first vpn configuration on the 19th, and everything was working fine at least on the 19th.

Anyone experienced this somehow/sometime?

I am suspicious of the "profile cleaner" addon, which allows to clean unused addons, but it reported nothing to clean when I run it on the 19th.
I'll check it later on tonight.

botafuco · VPN Manager for OpenVPN botafuco March 5, 2017 at 10:19 PM

Thank you for the feedback, zomboided. I checked the process for openvpn and it matches yours. So all good!

Indeed it seems to be a question of race condition and VPN taking a while to connect. Also maybe it's worth mentioning that I'm on WIFI only, which may add additional delay for the network to come up.

I do want to say anyway that I'm very happy with the addon of course! I appreciate your work very much.

botafuco · VPN Manager for OpenVPN botafuco March 4, 2017 at 6:32 PM

Quote from zomboided

1. The connection is handled by systemd before Kodi launches. It doesn't matter than the add-on is not running. When the add-on is up and running it'll look to see if there's a VPN connection active (based on whether the openvpn task is running) and then "guess" what it's connected to (ie the first validated connection).

2. You can look at pushing a dhcp-option to set the DNS via an up script - using up scripts are documented on the add-on wiki and dhcp-option is documented in the openvpn docs. Or you can always use a particular DNS by setting it within Libreelec - I'm not in front of a box tho so you can google how to do that. You can either use the DNS that your VPN provider gives you or just use google's own DNS servers. I'd probably just set it up to use google's for simplicity like apc is suggesting above.

Hi Zomboided,

About point 1) when I restart Kodi, as soon as it starts booting up, I quickly SSH into it and I run "netstat -tn", I can see that there is a connection to the weather forecast server (triggered by Kodi's addon) which is carried out from the LAN IP address, and not from VPN's IP.

Later refreshes of the weather forecast show that the connection is then made from the VPN's IP.

I'm sorry to ask again, I just want to make sure I understand it correctly. Thanks in advance.

botafuco · VPN Manager for OpenVPN botafuco February 26, 2017 at 5:29 PM

Quote from zomboided

1. The connection is handled by systemd before Kodi launches. It doesn't matter than the add-on is not running. When the add-on is up and running it'll look to see if there's a VPN connection active (based on whether the openvpn task is running) and then "guess" what it's connected to (ie the first validated connection).

2. You can look at pushing a dhcp-option to set the DNS via an up script - using up scripts are documented on the add-on wiki and dhcp-option is documented in the openvpn docs. Or you can always use a particular DNS by setting it within Libreelec - I'm not in front of a box tho so you can google how to do that. You can either use the DNS that your VPN provider gives you or just use google's own DNS servers. I'd probably just set it up to use google's for simplicity like apc is suggesting above.

Thank you for the clarifications to point 1), and the help for point 2) !
I'm updating to Krypton now, I'll give the dchp options a try.

botafuco · VPN Manager for OpenVPN botafuco February 26, 2017 at 9:25 AM

Glad to see zomboided here!

Thank you so much for your addon, I'm using it on my setup for a few weeks now and I'm very happy with it!

I've noticed two things that I want to check with you:

1) "Connect to VPN before Kodi starts (LibreELEC only)"
I've looked at the debug log, and I see that the library scanning starts and polls the internet for data before your addon/service launches. Maybe I'm doing something wrong or I misinterpret the meaning of your statement?

2) DNS lookups do not go through the VPN
I'm using an imported .ovpn file as my provider isn't supported, when I do an "nslookup hotmail.com" I can see that the name server used is that of my ISP, not my VPN provider. There are 2 UDP routes showing the NS'es of my ISP, but none showing the ones from my VPN provider. What could I be doing wrong?

Once again, thanks for your addon.