This post was originally published on November 7, 2010.
Here’s a technical post to explain how our support team solves connection problems that a small set of customers in the Middle East have experienced.
ExpressVPN offers both UDP and TCP-based VPN servers using the OpenVPN protocol. By default, your account is configured to connect via UDP. However, some ISPs or corporate firewalls block UDP traffic, preventing your computer from establishing a connection to our VPN network. Here’s an example of a log file where this problem occurs:
Sun Sep 26 20:12:30 2010 UDPv4 link remote: 98.126.5.194:1194
Sun Sep 26 20:12:30 2010 TLS: Initial packet from 98.126.5.194:1194, sid=f4b9e3d7 ff634c5c
Sun Sep 26 20:13:18 2010 TCP/UDP: Closing socket
Notice how there is a one minute delay between the last two lines.
When we see such cases, we ask the customer to try our TCP servers, and that usually solves the problem. We offer TCP servers in each of our network clusters around the world. Click here to see a list of ExpressVPN Server Locations, including instructions for adding our TCP configuration files.
If you ever run into connection issues, please email us and we’ll guide you through getting the problem fixed.