I have a home VPN wireguard setup (so not a commercial VPN). This has worked absolutely everywhere over the past few years, in over fifty countries, under all kinds of internet regimes/device restrictions etc.
Except today at Qatar (specifically Qatar airport wifi). Wireguard VPN connected to my home router didn’t working (it does work if I vpn using my US sim card mobile data, so the issue is definitely something on Qatari wifi).
Does anyone have suggestions on what can I try to have wireguard VPN work? I tried setting MTU to 1280, no
In my home server I have the default 51280 port setups through glinet (and right now I can’t access it, but even if I could given that this setup has worked absolutely everywhere I’m hesitant to mess with it unless it is literally the only/last option).
I travel full-time and multiple times I have had Wireguard blocked on non standard ports. I have also had Openvpn over UDP blocked, so they seemed to be blocking all UDP based VPN traffic.
In these cases what has worked for me is SoftEther on port 443 over TCP, as its traffic looks like https traffic. I have my router at a family member’s house setup to run Wireguard, Openvpn and SoftEther so I always have options.
Found this thread from some google searching. Adding FYI for future viewers. I have a client currently in Qatar using a self-hosted VPN back to the US, and Wireguard was being blocked. We tried multiple different ports with same results so I’m assuming it’s being blocked by the Qatar ISP at a protocol level (DPI), but OpenVPN is getting through just fine on default port 1194 UDP.
Ok, and there’s no way for me to change this default port while abroad yeah?
I’ll have to not use VPN on this trip and set it up with a different port when I’m home, am I correct in this understanding? Can I have a different VPN server profile setup just for Qatar so I don’t mess with already working option for everywhere else?
Just want to validate my options before I go down the changing port route.
There’s no reason for changing port to not work unless you create a conflict, you should be able to use any port from 49152 to 65535.
But I understand not wanting to change settings only for one use case.
You can forward a range of ports, so if you did say 51800:51900 → 51820, this would mean you could try any of those 100 ports, whilst still including your default port of 51820. Note, this isn’t necessarily best practice, opening 100 ports isn’t recommended. But you could do it to check it works on a certain port and then just have 2 lines for the 2 different ports forwarded to 51820 once you can confirm its working on another port.
If you have your router opened up to SSH (which I kinda hope you don’t) you could connect there and fix it. But I’m guessing since you have the VPN you’re relying on that to get you local access. That leaves you SIL right now.
You could use your US Sim to connect and fix it but be careful of roaming data rates!
If you can access the router you can change the port easily enough I did it on mine to rule out any problems. My router at least lets you route multiple ports to one so I originally had 51280 => 51280
I then added 17521 => 51280
Once I confirmed that was working too I deleted the first one.