Damned VPN

Friday, August 14, 2026 at 8:14 p.m.

NordVPN made changes to their servers and broke my current setup.

I had setup a VPN client on my ER605 router that connected to their servers on post 1194 with UDP. It provided VPN access to a VLAN my iMac was part of.

Now, NordVPN uses UDP on port 53 or TCP on port 80.

I could not get my router to connect to the new servers. It seems they also require a more recent version of TLS that my router does not support (I assume).

So I reverted to my old setup : I have my linux server connect using openvpn and provide a SOCKS5 proxy to be used by qBittorrent on my iMac.

But now, the webpage I made to start/stop the VPN no longer works. It was last used a year ago and PHP and Ubuntu were upgraded in the meantime.

The only way I can get it working is to start it manually at the command line.

Ugh.

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