I am on holiday and travelled from Europe to the Caribbean. I am in a resort where I have wifi. To make my connections more safe I prepared my router (pfSense) with OpenVPN. I tested everything before I left from home and it was working, but now I am here it does not. I can connect my OpenVPN, but the browser does not resolve websites on my Mac. Strange thing is that my Android Mobile does open websites when connected to the same OpenVPN instance.
I also have a Hide.me VPN that does work as expected, but it does of course not allow me to connect to local PC’s.
Could it be there is a setting in OpenVPN that I need to change for my Mac? The Macbook is from Mid 2012 and I cannot run the latest OS so I am still on Catalina. Browser is Edge, but Safari doesn’t work either.
WAN or LAN URLs? For example can you get to google but not your internally hosted sites? Sounds like a DNS issue though. Can you change your dns to 1.1.1.1 and see if that resolves this issue?
Sometimes there’s a setting or syntax to add in the file to forward to the server
Thank you for mentioning DNS! Of course, it is always DNS. I changed it on the Macbook to 1.1.1.1 and it websites were loading again.
Problem was resolving WAN and LAN DNS. WAN is working now, LAN is less important as I can reach my PC’s by their IP addresses.
There is a setting for forwarding DNS. I’ll have to look it up but in your config its a simple setting. Should let you access LAN and WAN by name.
I understand not an issue now just saying PFSense will also have issues though depending on version of OpenVPN. I think it is 2.7.0 anything after that version may cause issues depending on the VPN server. Just a heads-up depending again depends on a lot of variables.
it is easier just to set DNS on the Macbook since they are not running BigSur or later - 1.1.1.1 & 8.8.8.8