asus merlin openvpn - unable to disengage

[pattox]

I configured my asus merlin router (rtac56 fm 384.6) to use openvpn with with one client. That worked well but, mainly because of slow speeds, I decided to not continue using the router as the gateway to my vpn.

However, whatever I did to try to stop this, see below, the router kept connecting to my vpn
I tried
-turning the vpn off in the firmware
-using nvram unset command as described by Merlin some years ago
-using the default option in vpn to clear client settings

during these attempts there were multiple router reboots (using the power switch)

Also perversely, when I logged on to my vpn provider website it showed that I had no vpn connections active even though there was one active vpn connection ( yes I know I was connected because ip leak was showing a vpn ip address and my internet latency and speed results were a fraction of my normal ones)

The router interface showed no entries to openvpn clients.

In the end the only thing that did work was reset to factory settings of the router

1. Surely there must be an easier way of disengaging from a vpn than a factory reset

2.Why did the vpn OFF option in the firmware not wor?

 

[RMerlin]

Make sure you didn't mix up Server and Client on your router's webui. I frequently turn on/off a VPN client myself during my tests, and never had any problem with it.

Are you sure your IP leak test wasn't returning a cached result?

 

[pattox]

Thank you for your interest

It was definitely the vpn client, not server, settings

Re the ip leaktest. I'm sure also that it was not cached results. My normal ping latency is about 9ms and speeds about 35mbps. While I was having this problem and trying to disengage I checked ping and speeds several times. Ping was nearly 900ms (yes 900) and speeds about 4 mbps. This showed up on each machine and ipad on the network that I tried to reach different websites.

What actually alerted me to there being a problem initially was how painfully slow everything was even after turning off the vpn in the asus gui.

As I said I was amazed at how tenacious this connection between router and a specific vpn server was, and the effort required to disengage. Makes me nervous about trying to use vpn through the router.

 

[RMerlin]

Run "ps w | grep vpn" over SSH, see if there are any vpnclient process running. It will also tell you which of the five clients is running, in case you are stopping the wrong instance.

Also note that setting a client to Start at Boot will restart it every time you reboot or restart your WAN.

 

[pattox]

Run "ps w | grep vpn" over SSH, see if there are any vpnclient process running. It will also tell you which of the five clients is running, in case you are stopping the wrong instance.

Also note that setting a client to Start at Boot will restart it every time you reboot or restart your WAN.

Is this what you mean?
ASUSWRT-Merlin RT-AC56U 384.6-0 Wed Jul 25 16:34:54 UTC 2018
admin@RT-AC56U-FCC8:/tmp/home/root# ps w | grep vpn
7484 admin 1412 S grep vpn


I'm sure there's nothing there now.

Btw I did have the client initially set to start at boot (of the router?) and may not have changed that setting-can't rember exactly. But even is if it was so set once all of the openvpn client details were erased there would/should be nothing to start. As I said, whatever I did to turn off vpn/erase settings seemed to have no effect. It was only a factory reset that solved the problem

 

[pattox]

I may try to install an openvpn client again and try to replicate the problem. In retrospect the difficult part was trying different options to stop or remove the vpn, as mentioned in my first post which didn’t work.

After the factory reset it was not difficult to reconfigure the router to my preferred settingts.

 

[pattox]

I've now installed 2 vpn clients and everything is working perfectly. So it seems that the initial problem was a weird, one off, event.