My school and the Panera I go to have login authentication for their WiFi, and even with a VPN, I can’t connect to my AirMessage server. However, the craft store I go to and the McDonald’s by me also require login, yet I can connect from there. Are there any specific reasons for this issue?
It’s most likely due to ports being blocked on their networks. If you haven’t already tried, do the following steps with your VPN:
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Change the VPN client/app protocol from UDP to TCP.
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Choose 443 as the Remote Port. Now try using AirMessage.
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If it doesn’t work, try Remote Port 80.
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If it still doesn’t work, try every combination of ports available under both UDP and TCP protocols.
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If it still doesn’t work, well… just let us know and we’ll try to further help you.
Also, what VPN are you using?
Not a bug. Most likely a blocked website. School filters tend to block by category rather than specific sites. Your address must be raising some red flags.
And yep, it’s definitely not a bug. Public networks and Wi-Fi are often configured with a range of blocked ports, services, and protocols to prevent people (or at least attempt to) from unauthorized use, such as P2P file sharing (torrenting).
While most public networks, especially in coffee shops, don’t block standard VPN ports due to people often needing them for their jobs (connecting to internal company networks), it can still happen. Whenever I do work at Panera, I have use my own home server VPN which uses a different port than what PIA VPN has. Same case with the few McDonald’s Wi-Fi networks I’ve used, which were even more restricted.
Sometimes entire ranges of IP addresses are blocked. From my kids schools wifi it is not possible to ping my home network on spectrum. Probably would have to tor over port 80 and hope for an unblocked entry point as vpns are blocked also. It’s a challenge people in Syria UAE and the like struggle with every day. You need a proxy that can’t be blocked by hosting it at AWS or Google or somewhere that blocking would break to many things.
I’m using Thunder VPN which doesn’t allow for solution #1, but I’ll see if I can find VPN’s that do. 2 and 3 didn’t work for me, and I guess 4’s my best shot at this point haha. Thanks very much.
As well, lots of public hotspots block most ports to prevent unauthorized network use (i.e. peer-to-peer). Might be able to port-forward 80/443 (http/s) to airmessage but it’s a messy fix with no guarantees of working.
Oh ok, but just FYI for future: I meant those as steps instead of each being an individual solution (just added the word “steps” in that post to clarify for other people). So for example, in order to choose 443 or 80 as the remote port, you would need to first change the protocol to TCP. UDP would have remote port 53 and a couple others instead. Either way, if there’s no option to select TCP in the first place, then this stuff is moot for that VPN service. Definitely let us know how it goes!