VPN doesn't work: infinitely long connection setup

FromBerlin

I bought F-Secure Total in November 2023 for Windows, but so far the VPN doesn't work. When I click on the connect button, the icon rotates infinitely and does not stop. During that time, the internet connection is completely blocked.

I already reinstalled F-Secure. DNS is flushed. There is also an exception rule in the firewall (win 11) and – of course – I tried to chose different locations (and settings in the app).

Note: My router (AVM Fritz Router 6660) uses native IPv6 and custom DNS services (like Quad9) and the router forces to check those certificates for encrypted name resolution.

Any ideas to fix it?

PawełP

Hi @FromBerlin

I received a reply for you from our technical department.

Those results look strange. That returned IPv4 address XXXXX is not our real Germany VPN gateway IP address. It seems to belong to some cloud hosting provider Vultr which we are not involved with in any way. If you use Quad9 DNS correctly, it should return IPs like seen here DNS Lookup - Check All DNS Records for Any Domain (dnschecker.org)

Also we don’t have AAAA record for the freedome-de-gw.freedome-vpn.net so there should not be any IPv6 address returned for the query. You got result XXXXXXXXX which is not our IPv6 address either.

One more test you could do to bypass fritzbox for DNS resolving is following command (just one extra dot at end of the domain name):

nslookup freedome-de-gw.freedome-vpn.net. 8.8.8.8

Anyway, there is something wrong with the router it seems. You could try to use any other router (e.g. share access point from mobile phone) and run those same nslookup queries and see that they return correct IPs from range XXXXXXX.* and VPN connection should succeed.

We cannot help much more with the issue, it clearly isn’t in our VPN software. There is some info regarding this topic for example in here: FRITZ!Box: Entering the URL fritz.box suddenly redirects to an external page | Born's Tech and Windows World (borncity.com)

For example following query from any machine indicates that someone has registered fritz.box domain and gives those same IPs which got returned also for freedome-de-gw.freedome-vpn.net

nslookup fritz.box

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: fritz.box

Addresses: XXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXX

We suggest you to contact your router vendor with this info. Maybe configuring Windows to not use domain suffix fritz.box might help.

I hope it will help you.

Greetings

Pawel

• IP addresses have been hidden

PawełP

Hello @FromBerlin

Welcome to our forum and thank you for your comment.

Regarding your problem with connecting to VPN, indeed the cause of this may be your router. There is a lot of discussion on the web about this router. However, we would like to check it solidly and analyze what specifically causes VPN blocking on your computer. For this we will need diagnostic data from your computer.

Please check your inbox on our forum. I will send you there instructions for downloading the diagnostic data. Send them later in reply to my message.

Have a good one!

Pawel

PawełP

Hello @FromBerlin

Our technicians have analyzed the diagnostic data you sent. They show that resolving VPN gateway fails:

You could try to change from network settings DNS server addresses to manual (Google’s DNS):

IPv4 DNS to 8.8.8.8

IPv6 DNS to 2001:4860:4860::8888

And then try to connect VPN. Let us know if it helps. This is just for trying to figure out root-cause. It seems to be DNS related but these tests would give bit more details regarding the issue.

We will wait for your response.

Best regards

Pawel

FromBerlin

Thank you, but I'm afraid, there is no change. (yes, after restart etc. and yes, the custom dns setting works, but not the vpn of f-secure)

PawełP

Hi

Could you please check without VPN what this command line commands returns:

nslookup freedome-de-gw.freedome-vpn.net


nslookup freedome-de-gw.freedome-vpn.net 8.8.8.8

It would help to understand if something is blocking VPN gateway IP address resolving totally or just DNS requests from our OpenVPN process fail for some reason.

Also, can he test to change VPN protocol to IKEv2?

Regards

Pawel

FromBerlin

nslookup freedome-de-gw.freedome-vpn.net

↓

Server: dns11.quad9.net

Address: 2620:fe::11

Name:   freedome-de-gw.freedome-vpn.net.fritz.box

Addresses: XXXXX

nslookup freedome-de-gw.freedome-vpn.net 8.8.8.8

↓

Server: dns.google

Address: 8.8.8.8

Name:   freedome-de-gw.freedome-vpn.net.fritz.box

Addresses: XXXXX

I already tried different settings, e. g. the protocol.

• IP addresses have been hidden

FromBerlin

Hi,

thanks for the reply! Some things to add and specify...

1. I receive the same output, using dnschecker

2. "fritz box" (with dot between) is the internal domain of the router; so it's a pseudo-link (instead of the default IP) and only reachable inside the local network. But: In January someone registered that as a regular Domain (fritz box), which lead in a big confusing situation. Now the public domain is down, I guess for copyright reasons.

3. The reply of the nslookup

4. As I already mentioned, using my mobile phone (Android) there are no problems using your VPN-App with my router. So I still doubt this has anything to to with the router.