Stay connected to PIA after network hick-up

gogos

Apologies if this has been asked before: So, I have noticed that due to some router/ISP issues my network comes and goes (maybe once every couple of days). When the system gets reconnected on it's own PIA is off. How can I prevent that from happening?

MacOS: 10.11.2

PIA: v.55

Thanks in advance

tomeworm

Thank you for listing your OSX version and PIA version. Hardly anyone ever does that when they ask a question, which usually necessitates having to ask the OP for that info.

The answer to your question is that you can't "prevent" it. If the network connection to your computer drops it will also disconnect you from your vpn, whether it be PIA or anyone else. The vpn server pings your computer to verify you're still there ("keep alive signal"). If your computer doesn't respond to several pings it will drop the connection, as it should.

UltraHumanite

The app should automatically re-connect when the internet connection is re-established and for me when I used the PIA app it sometimes did and often did not. To put it plainly the PIA app is just not very good when it comes to re-connection in these types of situations. PIA app also has issues with waking from sleep and reconnecting.

Since you're on a Mac you might consider using Viscosity, it has the auto reconnect functionality and I haven't had problems with it yet. It has a 30-day free trial too.

gogos

tomeworm said:

The answer to your question is that you can't "prevent" it. If the network connection to your computer drops it will also disconnect you from your vpn, whether it be PIA or anyone else. The vpn server pings your computer to verify you're still there ("keep alive signal"). If your computer doesn't respond to several pings it will drop the connection, as it should.

But it drops the connection from the server side. Can't the client block the outgoing connections the moment internet connection is re-established?

PLUS: since there is an autoconnect functionality in the GUI, I assume that the logic behind this can be extended to cover such scenarios.

tomeworm

I answered your question and UltraHumanite expanded on that and even offered you a suggestion for an app that, in his experience, and mine as well, works better than the PIA for auto-reconnecting. In fact it works better in every regard and is much better supported too. It's easily worth the $9.

I am sorry you're experiencing problems with the PIA app, but the fact is it's got lots of issues that have been well known to PIA for a very long time. They haven't been so good about fixing the bugs and, unfortunately, with every new update they introduce new problems, such as the latest version which shuts down the OSX firewall (utterly insane!). You could try rolling back to a previous version and seeing if it's more reliable for you. I'm running ver. 49 myself and I've found it to be far more stable than the later versions. But I still use Viscosity most of the time.