Kill Switch and DNS Leak
Hey everyone. Noob here. So... I am getting my feel for PIA and things aren't too bad. I am on an iMac and yesterday was my the first day out of the 7 day window. I started with the PIA app. No big complaints, but I didn't like that it was disabling my firewall without my knowledge. I did a bunch of reading and watched a bunch of videos and decided to download Viscosity. I really like it so I decided to remove the PIA app.
No complaints... Just discussion here. I found a thread on TorGuard that you can use AppleScript to create a Kill Switch type feature and Viscosity will run that script when it disconnects from the VPN. I went ahead and created the script, added my own flare to it by including a system sound so I could hear if the connection dropped. The discussion here is about how the PIA kill switch works? I don't think I enabled it because if I ticked it in the APP, it wanted to do a system restart. That just didn't feel right for some reason. Don't know why. So is simply having a script that kills the program that you no longer want connected to the internet if not in the VPN enough? What if you have another internet program open? Do all applications need to be killed?
As for the DNS Leak protection. I believe I did have that ticked on the PIA APP. Was that simply using the PIA DNS servers? The only time I have ever gotten green on the DNSLeak.com (associated with PIA) is when connected to PIA DNS servers. Even if I am on a VPN, using my own DNS servers of choice, I get red.
It looks like that when on Viscosity, I can ONLY use the PIA DNS servers. Is that correct? I tried modifying the OVPN file to include a "block-outside-dns" but Viscosity wouldn't connect with that line added. I don't have an issue using PIA DNS servers, I was just trying things out. I put Comodo servers on my router for DNS, then I switched to OPEN DNS as I was working on some other things, but I noticed OPEN DNS provides services to Comcast and that is my ISP, so I will probably switch them again. Can we just use PIA as default (even if not connected)?
What do you all do?
Final comment... Yesterday started getting some really horrible connection speeds. I was a little frustrated about it because some of the comments I saw online that criticized PIA was that after the money back period things slowed down. I ended up switching from the DNS file to the IP file and used a server and that fixed the issue.
So, let's have a discussion on these topics. Educate me.
No complaints... Just discussion here. I found a thread on TorGuard that you can use AppleScript to create a Kill Switch type feature and Viscosity will run that script when it disconnects from the VPN. I went ahead and created the script, added my own flare to it by including a system sound so I could hear if the connection dropped. The discussion here is about how the PIA kill switch works? I don't think I enabled it because if I ticked it in the APP, it wanted to do a system restart. That just didn't feel right for some reason. Don't know why. So is simply having a script that kills the program that you no longer want connected to the internet if not in the VPN enough? What if you have another internet program open? Do all applications need to be killed?
As for the DNS Leak protection. I believe I did have that ticked on the PIA APP. Was that simply using the PIA DNS servers? The only time I have ever gotten green on the DNSLeak.com (associated with PIA) is when connected to PIA DNS servers. Even if I am on a VPN, using my own DNS servers of choice, I get red.
It looks like that when on Viscosity, I can ONLY use the PIA DNS servers. Is that correct? I tried modifying the OVPN file to include a "block-outside-dns" but Viscosity wouldn't connect with that line added. I don't have an issue using PIA DNS servers, I was just trying things out. I put Comodo servers on my router for DNS, then I switched to OPEN DNS as I was working on some other things, but I noticed OPEN DNS provides services to Comcast and that is my ISP, so I will probably switch them again. Can we just use PIA as default (even if not connected)?
What do you all do?
Final comment... Yesterday started getting some really horrible connection speeds. I was a little frustrated about it because some of the comments I saw online that criticized PIA was that after the money back period things slowed down. I ended up switching from the DNS file to the IP file and used a server and that fixed the issue.
So, let's have a discussion on these topics. Educate me.
Comments
I would be happy to give you all the answers you seek however as you may have read we will be decommissioning the forums at some point this week and I would hate to have you loose all your info when that does happen. As this is quite an involved post with lots of questions would you mind opening a ticket in our support tool and letting us know your ticket number? https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/contact-us
I look forward to hearing back from you.