Hello everyone,
I’m seeking help to understand and fix an issue with my PfSense setup. I used this ~https://blog.networkprofile.org/mullvad-vpn-with-wireguard-in-pfsense-setup-guide/~ to configure my home network with Mullvad VPN, and everything worked fine for a few months. However, one day it suddenly stopped working. Currently, when connected to my network, I have no internet access at all. When I log into my PfSense console, everything looks good except that my Mullvad WG traffic graph is not showing any activity, though the Gateway and interface are green, up, and connected.
Although I’m not a networking expert, I consider myself slightly above average in this field. I created a backup of my PfSense setup right after configuring everything, anticipating potential issues like this. Unfortunately, restoring the backup did not resolve the problem. Rather than starting from scratch, I’d like to understand what went wrong and learn from it.
If someone could point me in the right direction for figuring out the issue and how to correct it, rather than doing a fresh install, I would greatly appreciate it.
Thank you!
don’t trust the gateway stuff for information on this because its not reliable, its up because its an internal / local address lol
if you look at the WG tab below it, you can see it shows 0 active peers which means it isn’t working / transferring data
you can go to the WG status tab and check out the handshake there
one thing you can also do is change the gateway monitoring ip to something external like 1.1.1.1 but the problem with that is that sometimes you can have connectivity issue to there from your vpn but not have issues with the vpn tunnel itself (meaning that you could end up trying to restart the instance even though theres nothing wrong with it / anything you can do to remedy the issue on your end)
Have you tried different VPN peers? VPN provider servers have issues sometimes and the peer will just not work, often it’s obvious (downed connection) but sometimes there is no indication other then not passing traffic. I’d check all that first before thinking it’s pfsense.
if your VPN tunnel suddenly stopped working, 99.99% its server related, most likely either they no longer using that server or its broken and they left it as is. The only fix for this is change to a different server.
For me I use OpenVPN instead of wireguard so VPN client configuration are all the same its just differs on the IP address where it connect to, so all I did is change the IP address of the server based on the updated available VPN servers from the VPN provider and that usually fix the issue.
Another option is to change the gateway monitoring IP to something external like 1.1.1.1. However, this can sometimes lead to connectivity issues with that IP from your VPN, even if the VPN tunnel itself is fine. This means you might end up restarting the instance unnecessarily, as there wouldn’t be an issue you can fix on your end.
Thank you for your input on this.
I thought this was a great idea, and before setting up a new peer, I noticed that the Mullvad server list included endpoints as IP addresses. On a hunch, I copied an IP address and used it instead of the hostname. After applying this change, everything returned to normal. Interestingly, when I switched back to using the hostname from the website, it also worked.
Thank you for your comment, which led me to this discovery. I had been stuck on this issue for a few days, and it was getting very frustrating. I’m happy to have resolved it without having to start from scratch.
Thanks again!!
I will keep this in mind. Thank you for sharing.
I will look into this. Thanks for sharing.
no problem. Couple further comments: I recommend leaving it with the IP’s only in the config, this way you don’t rely on DNS issues killing your VPN. Second FYI, you can have multiple peers per tunnel and they don’t count toward your total number of allowed connections/devices, which for most providers is 5. If one peer dies in a clean way, it will auto switch to traffic over the other peer, at least most of the time.
Did not know this… That’s awesome!! Thank you for letting me know. Much appreciated
