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ASUS RT AC88U with Merlin and VPN Bypassing

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Alaska_av8r

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I have a small home network using this router with Merlin installed. I have a VPN setup with ExpressVPN using OpenVPN on the router. I have done the VPN for security and privacy reasons but have ran into a stumbling block. I live here in the US and now find that I cannot access Amazon. I have tried all suggestions that ExpressVPN can provide, changing servers etc but to no avail Amazon blocks me everytime.

I am an Amazon Prime junkie and order something almost weekly and the wife and I end up watching prime movies on the weekend using either a Roku or Amazon Firestick. I was finally able to get through to amazon's website so I can at least still order stuff but cannot watch movies.

I am pretty much a novice on a lot of this but I have found out how to allow specific devices etc to bypass the VPN (Roku etc) and also saw that I could allow any traffic going outbound to a specific website bypass the VPN. The problem is when I do this expressvpn warns me of a DNS leak or something like that.

I don't really know what that means or what the danger is. So for me it is a convenience to have the VPN on the router (instead of installing expressvpn on everything else) but the frustrations with Amazon make it a severe inconvenience to turn the VPN off if I want to watch a movie.

What are the dangers of routing Amazon's website outside the VPN?

thank you
tim
 
I have a small home network using this router with Merlin installed. I have a VPN setup with ExpressVPN using OpenVPN on the router. I have done the VPN for security and privacy reasons but have ran into a stumbling block. I live here in the US and now find that I cannot access Amazon. I have tried all suggestions that ExpressVPN can provide, changing servers etc but to no avail Amazon blocks me everytime.

I am an Amazon Prime junkie and order something almost weekly and the wife and I end up watching prime movies on the weekend using either a Roku or Amazon Firestick. I was finally able to get through to amazon's website so I can at least still order stuff but cannot watch movies.

I am pretty much a novice on a lot of this but I have found out how to allow specific devices etc to bypass the VPN (Roku etc) and also saw that I could allow any traffic going outbound to a specific website bypass the VPN. The problem is when I do this expressvpn warns me of a DNS leak or something like that.

I don't really know what that means or what the danger is. So for me it is a convenience to have the VPN on the router (instead of installing expressvpn on everything else) but the frustrations with Amazon make it a severe inconvenience to turn the VPN off if I want to watch a movie.

What are the dangers of routing Amazon's website outside the VPN?

thank you
tim

There is more danger using legitimate sites through a vpn at home and it will definitely be slower than your native network with increased latency and lower throughput. I'd keep the vpn for your torrent and extra curricular activities ;)

Most large companies are implementing proxy blocks to reduce fraud and to enforce regional access.
 
I am having the same issue with expressVPN as well. The thing is when I use the VPN service using the L2TP protocol I have no issues with netflix and prime but the problem I now have with this is my speed is cut in half. When I use the Openvpn protocol Netflix tells me that I'm behind a proxy, I rather use OpenVPN because the speed is much faster but it seems like there's an issue here. I will try the PTPP protocol when I get home to see what the speeds are looking like but I know its not as secure as the OpenVPN or the L2TP. BTW I use the wasington server.
 
Ok thanks I have manged to solve, not sure how the dns leak, I will look at the Wash Server and see if Prime Movies will work.
 

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