I have been slowly trying to setup my Teracube 2s that came pre-installed with |e| on it. One of the first things I did was install AdAway using the VPN option. I want a clear view of what DNS requests are being made by applications running, and as I install them to ensure there’s no shady connections. The Advanced Privacy app that came with the OS already flagged the default Browser app with Google trackers, so clearly this is a necessity even though it’s supposed to be deGoogled. Everything was working fine - until this morning.
All apps suddenly stopped being able to connect to the internet. Suspecting I did something wrong with a setting I “Reset all app settings”. Still no internet on anything. I did locate and enable the “Always-on VPN” setting last night for Ad-Away. Interestingly enough after I enabled it I could access the internet with no issues. I tried clearing the app cache, data, and uninstalling it completely to no avail.
Now I’m still getting a warning saying “Disconnected from Always-on VPN”. I didn’t disable this setting for AdAway prior to uninstalling it, because I naturally assumed with no VPN available it couldn’t remain active. Now when I go into the VPN settings there’s no VPN to adjust this setting as there are no existing VPNs setup. The error information says “Legacy VPN” is what it’s trying to connect to, can’t, and therefore is killing all internet. Is this a bug? I don’t believe this should be happening.
I went back onto fDroid to reinstall AdAway, but I can’t as the VPN blocking things is still active. Any ideas apart from a factory reset?!
Yes, I did try rebooting - not to safe mode. How would I do that on |e|?
Browser automatically tried to open a link from another app (that shouldn’t be a web link), but I didn’t allow anything to load. I think I’ll stick to TOR, as I haven’t received any tracker block warnings in the Advanced Privacy app or AdBlock when the default browser was switched to it.
In my post the words “safe mode” are blueish and clickable and contain a hyperlink that brings you to the description.
In case you use Advanced Privacy’s “hide my IP” you 'll use the tor-network anyways and thus the vpn-interface of your device (but cannot be combined with other apps that rely on the device’s vpn-interface like adaway).
Hiding my IP doesn’t actually BLOCK connections to Google though. Anytime something shady comes up like that I can remove it’s ability to connect, not just hide where I am. That’s the ultimate goal. Stop inappropriate data collection & sharing.
Restarted the device in safe mode, and since I already uninstalled the AdBlock there was still nothing to adjust in the VPN settings. When I restarted it again into normal mode was like hitting the rewind button. When I looked at the statistics for Advanced Privacy there were fewer leaks than previously reported. That’s odd no? What actually happened when booting into safe mode there? I’d like to understand more what happened here and it seems it wasn’t just disabling 3rd party apps & airplane mode.
It is no longer trying to connect to a non-existing VPN though, so that’s a plus! I have my internet back.
That was the idea of the operation wasn’t it?
In the linked howto the loss of “always on” for vpn is described as an issue of the safe mode, whereas for you it was the desired feature.
Anytime something shady comes up like that I can remove it’s ability to connect, not just hide where I am. That’s the ultimate goal. Stop inappropriate data collection & sharing.