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System

  • Ubuntu 15.10 Wily
  • Desktop Environment: GNOME Shell 3.16.4
  • VPN: Astrill v2.9.3

Problem

I live in China. Without a VPN, I can't access many sites, including Google, Facebook, etc. Thus, I have bought the Astrill VPN and installed it on my computer.

The VPN works perfectly, at least on my browsers. I can access Facebook, Google, and other sites available in the U.S. on Firefox and Chromium. However, the terminal command line doesn't seem to know that I am on VPN and can access blocked sites in China.

For example, I can access the Google's robots.txt file by going to google.com/robots.txt on a web browser. However, when I try to download the file via the command line by typing:

wget https://www.google.com/robots.txt

It just gets stuck there. I also tried writing a simple Python script with urllib2.urlopen() on a url and every blocked url I tried it on gave me a:

urlopen error [Errno 110] Connection timed out>

This made me believe that the terminal command line simply doesn't recognize I have my VPN on and that I am making the wget request from my actual ip address from China.

I always thought that VPN is a proxy that is applied system-wide, and so I thought that the terminal command line would believe that I am not in China anymore. Turns out I might be wrong and misinformed.

What can be done?

Edit:

I installed some applications that will look up the geolocation of an IP address:

sudo apt-get install geoip-bin geoip-database.

I got my IP address recognized by the command line by running hostname -I.

So I tried to look up my geolocation by running: geoiplookup $(hostname -I)

The output? GeoIP Country Edition: IP Address not found

I tried inputting the same IP address with some web apps on my browser and as expected, no luck.

Eddo Hintoso
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  • Hello and welcome. What kind of VPN are you using (protocol)? Maybe this link can help you? https://askubuntu.com/questions/95926/how-to-initiate-vpn-from-terminal – YpsilonKah Feb 19 '16 at 08:50
  • @HATEthePLOT - I found out the problem (was using OpenWeb instead of OpenVPN). Sorry if my question was trivial, but nonetheless thanks for the suggestion. – Eddo Hintoso Feb 20 '16 at 15:51

1 Answers1

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Well, I found out the problem.

Turns out I was using my Astrill VPN configured as OpenWeb. This means that the VPN is only tunnelled via web browsers and whatnot.

I then changed my configuration to OpenVPN, which means "it has advanced split routing/split tunnelling features and can tunnel all applications on your computer." All applications meaning web browsers, and everything else including the terminal command-line. Now all my requests from the command-line are made through the VPN tunnel, and I am a happy man.

I guess the OpenVPN configuration is the "system-wide proxy" that I always thought would be the configuration of all VPNs. Using OpenWeb previously explains why I can only access China's blocked sites from the web.

If you'd like to know more about the difference between VPN protocols - here's what Astrill has to say, but I don't know if this is applicable to all VPNs. However, I'd imagine their explanations to vary only slightly.

Eddo Hintoso
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