Hi all, i go to a school who’s wifi blocks super simple stuff like signal, discord, and twitter. i got expressvpn recently to try it out, but whenever i pressed connect on my phone, it would try to connect and fail (i havent actually seen the fail screen, but i presume it fails since after a minute of “still connecting” nothing happens.) ive tried this on all three ports in the app, and none of them work. is there another setting im missing to unblock the wifi?
PS: i also find it kind of ironic that one of expressvpn’s main selling points is that it unblocks wifi at school and work
this might be a stupid question. i dont know shit about technology, but is it possible to block VPNs? wouldnt every government just do that, then, to ensure that you couldnt have security from their observations? specifically china and the US.
The app doesn’t have ports options, so I am not sure what you’re talking about. My suggestion is to change the protocol to TCP (OpenVPN or Lightway) and then connect. It should work in theory as TCP uses ports that aren’t blocked by network admins.
i guess it would be, but its kind of weird that, from all the locations ive tried (which is a lot), none of them work. expressvpn doesnt connect to a centralized server and beyond, but it directly connects to one, which means that my schools firewall would have to block every server location.
sorry, thats what i meant by port. none of them work
You’d have to use the OpenVPN (TCP) protocol because it usually bypass firewalls because it uses port 443 which is HTTPS traffic and they can’t block that. Anything else would usually get blocked or have problems. Just stick to OpenVPN (TCP)
Let it keep trying on TCP. It has to connect. Your school can’t block 443.
Seems like that your school has just a whitelist of all the websites that are allowed and the rest is blocked. Nothing will probably help you in this case.
from what i can see, my school uses fortinet (i remember that since it sounds like fortnite, lol). on their website, it says enterprise-grade something something whatever, so it must be pretty good at blocking VPNs
thats what im saying. it blocks tcp.
yeah no it blocks it. trust me. check out the other comment thread
nope. it is definitely not a whitelist. i have gotten to some obscure websites before that no one would’ve thought of. their could be a whitelist with ports though.
You’re going to have keep trying different servers on TCP until it works I guess.
In this case, try using something like shadowsocks. It seems like that the school is literally just blocking everything except 443 and 80 (and a few other ports for emails, etc). Or just grab yourself your own VM and setup your own. A racknerd vps can go for quite low (lower than for express vpn) and it should work pretty well (just find a racknerd black friday link, $9 for a year is not much) and set up shadowsocks or trojan with the standard web ports. Otherwise, there is nothing much that I can think of, so try to give this a shot. As for expressVPN, it may be useless against port blocking (This isn’t even seen in China, like wtf?)
im dumb, how do i do that? do i do that in a terminal or do i just type that in a web browser
im on linux, the dig command doesnt exist for me
im on manjaro if that helps
also, i use termux to use a terminal at my school since i dont bring a computer with me to school
okay, i will try when im at school on monday
here’s the output:
~ $ nslookup
> server 8.8.8.8
Default server: 8.8.8.8
Address: 8.8.8.8#53
> google.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
I found something interesting. I was talking to my friend, and he found this really sketchy VPN on the play store that ACTUALLY WORKS! i dont want to comment it here just incase fortinet is reading or something, but if you want it I can DM you. This is kind of crazy.