I’m travelling for the moment, and usually I just access my home network with tailscale and it has always worked flawlessly. But the hotel I’m staying at apparently blocks VPN connections, I can’t use my regular VPN for work on their network either and I’ve tried obfuscation,different ports etc. nothing seems to work and it never connects.
How can I circumvent this, if at all? I’m staying for several weeks, so this is a pretty bug issue.
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Best bet is probably going to be using something like OpenVPN on port 443 in TCP mode, which basically looks like regular HTTPS. It’s a hotel, I doubt they’re going to be doing deep analysis to detect signs it’s OpenVPN. It’s detectable easily but they wouldn’t spend the money on that advanced of a firewall.
My guess is they went for an allowed list of ports rather than blocked, so it lets DNS (53), HTTP (80), HTTPS (443), probably also POP/IMAP/SMTP (110, 995, 143, 993, 465)
Yeah this actually works, but only specifically for openvpn on 443 in TCP mode…anything wireguard is blocked regardless of port.
Yep there’s a reason I reached directly for that configuration. WireGuard uses UDP, that’s one of the first things that gets blocked.
Turns out that’s also the kind of protocol corporate VPNs use, reusing port 443 over TCP. They call those “SSL VPN”. They get to weed out all commercial VPNs used to bypass their firewalls as well as most torrent/game activity while still mostly catering to their business guests.
I mean, while they can block most things, to give people a usable experience they’re going to allow http and https traffic through, and they can’t really proxy https because of the TLS layer.
So for universal chance of success, running openvpn tcp over port 443 is the most likely to get past this level of bad. I guess they could block suspicious traffic in the session before TLS is established (in order to block certain domains). OpenVPN does support traversing a proxy, but it might only work if you specify it. If their network sets a proxy via DHCP, maybe you could see that and work around it.
I did have fun working around an ex gf’s university network many years ago to get a VPN running over it. They were very, very serious about blocking non-standard services. A similar “through” the proxy method was the last resort they didn’t seem to bother trying to stop.
What can you do if the school has a whitelist of domains they accept HTTPS (443) connections for?
That’s got to be extremely rare. Not much you can do in that case. But they will hit many problems with that approach.
I will try to investigate further, but for instance if you go to duckduckgo.com, it says something like “this website is not on our whitelist, let us know if you think you need access.” It’s very annoying, so I avoid the WiFi when I can.
Try mullvad use different ports, use their circumvention approaches.
Use your cell phone mobile data
Talk to the hotel, tell them you cannot connect to your corporate vpn, ask if they have a workaround
I’ve used mullvad but that can’t punch through either no matter what. Unfortunately I don’t have enough mobile data abroad to fuel my streaming needs for the entire duration of my trip.
I’ll talk to the reception when I get back to the hotel I guess…it’s really frustrating and I hate using hotel WiFi without a VPN.
What country are you in? China?
Go to mullvad settings and choose random ports
Try 53, 80, 443 etc
Just Czech republic, I’ve already tried this in mullvad, it never connects.
It would be absolutely bizarre if you couldn’t connect with
WireGuard portandWireguard obfuscationset toAutomatic. Things to try first:- Connect without your VPN and try to access a single website like the theguardian.com
- Once that’s working, enable your VPN and that should do it.
- If you still can’t get connected, try switching out different countries. Each country listed corresponds to an IP to which your machine will try to connect over a benign port like 443 – so blocking that sort of traffic would be mad unless the IP is explicitly blocked. Therefore, driving to different country targets offers a different IP every time. They’d have to know Mulvad’s whole list and block them all.
If the above somehow doesn’t work, Mulvad offers support through which you can get a temporary
Server IP override. You can enter that in the bottom portion of your app’s settings.
They probably are likely using DPI
Not OP, but my ISP blocks those :)
I had the same situation, my hotel used fortinet and they blocked almost everything
Even VPNs that used to work in China were blocked
I used my phone 4g hotspot to initialize the tailscale connection, which was blocked, I chose my server as an exit point, then I switched back to the WiFi. Amazingly, once logged in to tailscale, it kept connected to my server.
Then for added safety I used my kasm install to stream a Firefox browser running on my server
I don’t really understand this, why would a hotel pay thousands and thousands of euro for a “Chinese internet experience” that is going to piss off every single customer
Contact support and tell them you need VPN access on the WiFi you are paying for.
Seriously, lots of employees depend on VPNs to access their work computers. VPNs are also a great way to ensure the hotel isn’t snooping your internet traffic.
unless you are important they’ll tell you to pound sand.
That’s not a good way to keep customers. I would leave a bad review and maybe even find a different hotel. You could ask for a refund for your remaining stay you could argue they are engaging in false advertising.
Let’s be real the type of hotel I can afford doesn’t want customers that care about the Wi-Fi
Then don’t offer WiFi. It costs them more to ruin your experience
I’ve had this issue many times as well. I’ve found changing the MTU would help since it seems some filter specific ranges. Doesn’t always work but I’ve had more success than failure doing so
I’ll give that a go
MTU 1280 fixes all MTU problems, at a cost to performance.
I found my works wifi blocks most ports outbound, but switching my my vpn to a more ‘standard’ port like 80, 443, 22, etc gets through just fine.
Now I’ve got a couple port forwarding rules I can switch on, as needed, that take one of those and route it to my vpn host.
Have you passed their captive portal before turning on the VPN?
I haven’t encountered a captive portal at all. I can use the internet just fine without VPN.
Wild
This advice is what it is, but I work in a school and Tailscale also seems to be (unintentionally) blocked. After a while I realized it was only the login server that was blocked. If I login using my phone data I can go back to the regular network and it works.
This did the trick, ingot my tailscale to stay connected by using my phone AP to log on and then switched to hotel WiFi…thanks
This was years ago, but I had a similar issue of not being able to SSH in a hotel. I talked to the front desk and they were able to grant me access to a different network that didn’t have that blocked. I can’t remember whether I had to pay for it or not…
That is why i have everything that needs to be accessible, is reasonably secure and is not critical like management interfaces exposed.
You could try to http proxy your connection. As soon as the connection is then encrypted with https no firewall can block it.
The firewall probably blocks everything except port 80 and 443 and every protocol except tcp and udp.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, automates assignment of IPs when connecting to a network DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web HTTPS HTTP over SSL IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email IP Internet Protocol SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption TCP Transmission Control Protocol, most often over IP TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL UDP User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
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It’s a headache most of the time so you might consider purchasing a local SIM card for 4/5G connection instead (and share connection via mobile phone) in the future.
You could try using a relay somewhere in your process; while I was on a travel gig I had to do some finicky work with a travel router (though this may not work, since you need a VPN for your work, but maybe it’ll give you an idea: https://ideatrash.net/2022/05/howto-secure-and-share-your-internet-on-free-wireless-wifi.html
Also if you have your DNS resolvers manually put in, you may not encounter their portal. Had that problem when on hotel wifi as well.
All that said, I ended up using phone data a lot.
Several weeks… might just be worth it to take a walk and find another hotel. Then cancel the rest of your nights at hotel#1 and cite their internet blocking policy of VPNs for the reason for cancelling the remainder of your stay, as it prevents you and many other professionals from working.
