[SOLVED] Brother_MFC-J5330DW intermittently unavailable on wireless network, might WICD help?

ferrari · 03-11-2021, 11:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Muzzah

As far as I can tell this is the appropriate driver. It never really seemed like this would be a driver issue since it worked perfectly when it did work.

No, we cross posted. No need to check - you've already reported it is working.

ferrari · 03-11-2021, 11:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Muzzah

The route table is currently

Code:

rjh@rjh-NUC8i5BEH:~$ ip route
default via 192.168.0.1 dev wlp0s20f3 proto dhcp metric 600
169.254.0.0/16 dev wlp0s20f3 scope link metric 1000
192.168.0.0/24 dev wlp0s20f3 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.0.12 metric 600

That looks as expected.

Quote:

Re split tunneling I'll do some research but that sounds rather black-belt.

Spit tunneling should not be required here (from a routing POV at least). Hosts on your LAN (such as file servers or printers) should still be accessible as routing is not employed for host traffic residing in the same subnet. However, your active VPN client software adds iptables entries to effectively limit all access to any other address other than the VPN gateway, and that was the problem here.

Muzzah · 03-11-2021, 05:49 PM

I think it's really fixed this time! (I'm far from being an expert though and anyone with similar problems should probably treat the following with caution. I thought I'd fixed this in the past too.)

The solution for most operating systems using a VPN seems to be to select "Allow local network discovery" in whatever GUI they use. NordVPN on linux uses a command line tool and doesn't seem to have this option. The trick is to whitelist bits of your network so that they'll still work. See for instance: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1302...vents-printing (I must say this all seem rather sloppy on the part of NordVPN who provide no information on this.)

So for me I first had to change the printer connection (using the CUPS interface) to use its ip address. In my case this became ipp://192.168.0.14:631/ipp/print

Next I used the terminal to enter:

Quote:

nordvpn whitelist add subnet 192.168.0.14/16

After connecting NordVPN I could now ping the printer and actually print stuff!

Many thanks to all the patient contributors for their help.

ferrari · 03-11-2021, 07:10 PM

Yep...that adjusts the firewall to allow access to your local LAN. Glad to read of your success with this.

computersavvy · 03-11-2021, 08:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Muzzah

I think it's really fixed this time! (I'm far from being an expert though and anyone with similar problems should probably treat the following with caution. I thought I'd fixed this in the past too.)

The solution for most operating systems using a VPN seems to be to select "Allow local network discovery" in whatever GUI they use. NordVPN on linux uses a command line tool and doesn't seem to have this option. The trick is to whitelist bits of your network so that they'll still work. See for instance: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1302...vents-printing (I must say this all seem rather sloppy on the part of NordVPN who provide no information on this.)

So for me I first had to change the printer connection (using the CUPS interface) to use its ip address. In my case this became ipp://192.168.0.14:631/ipp/print

Next I used the terminal to enter:

After connecting NordVPN I could now ping the printer and actually print stuff!

Many thanks to all the patient contributors for their help.

I think that whitelist should have been

nordvpn whitelist add subnet 192.168.0.0/24

to match the subnet your router is providing for the LAN.
The way you entered it is not standard and while it may work for you it also has a possibility of failing at some point because the broadcast address is different on a /16 subnet.

Muzzah · 03-12-2021, 03:08 AM

I really wish I could understand this stuff! The worst of it is worrying that I'll mislead someone with a similar problem. Can I whitelist both?

computersavvy · 03-12-2021, 10:11 AM

The one I gave you should work to allow access to anything on your local LAN.

To understand more about network addresses and subnets look at http://www.ralphb.net/IPSubnet/index.html