When my iPhone is connected to VPN I get flaky response from sites other than my own

VPN
1

I have VPN Plus installed my my RT2600ac Synology Router. When I’m at home on my wifi and connected to the VPN, that seems to work well EXCEPT for interacting with normal websites, where the site may respond more slowly or not at all. Using youtube is bad. Disconnect from the VPN and everything is good. What’s going on here? How do I debug it? I don’t need to be on the VPN when I’m at home but I don’t want to have to manage that either especially for other people in my household.

2

Being on you local network and connecting to your VPN is bad. Your traffic is hairpinning which can cause all sorts of unexpected behavior. If you’re using OpenVPN, it might be worth it to use the app Passepartout and pay for the premium features which will do on demand connections to your VPN when you’re not on your local wifi. If you’re doing LT2P, have a look at this site to create your own auto connect profile: https://www.autoconnectvpn.com/. If you don’t want to use a website to generate the VPN profile, then you can pull down the code from this Git repo and run it locally: GitHub - klinquist/iOS-VPN-Autoconnect: Generates a mobileconfig file to auto-connect to a VPN on your iOS device.

3

Thanks. Sounds like exactly what my problem is. I’m not well versed on VPN platforms. Just did a very simple setup of VPN PLus on the router. I picked Synology VPN. Not sure if that means I’m using LT2P or not really. When I follow your www.autoconnectvpn URL, Chrome says “your connection is not private” - some kind of certificate issue maybe?

4

Yeah not sure why his site’s SSL cert isn’t working correctly, I got the same thing. It’s safer to visit his Guthub repo and download the HTML and run it locally.

First things first though, look at your VPN setup to see if it’s L2TP or OpenVPN. If L2TP then this auto connect configuration will do the trick. If OpenVPN, then you need to use the app I mentioned instead. If you use the app, a single purchase can be used on other devices if you’re all part of the same family from an AppStore perspective. I think it’s like $8 USD.