Hi
It is all a black art to me, and the acronyms mean nothing to me, but I will add this for clarity and the benefit of others (I have no reason to disagree with you).
ExressVPN has within its own software an “Options” configuration button that allows you to choose radio buttons between
“Automatic”, “UDP”, “TCP”, “L2TP/IPsec”, “SSTP”, and “PPTP”
It defaulted to UDP on installation and didn’t work. After changing to “TCP” it worked. I confess that I am surprised that it did not either default to “Automatic” or otherwise auto-detect the setting that worked, but that is by the bye.
I disabled the firewall before resorting to trying for outside assistance. I had already disabled Windows firewall because I gather that running multiple firewalls is superfluous and degrades performance, and Avast has its own. (As an aside, if you recommend that I enable Windows firewall as well I would be interested to know). Anyway, for this purpose I also disabled Avast firewall and ignored the dire warning messages. This made no difference to the fact that neither Secureline worked nor did ExpressVPN under its default (UDP) setting.
That left the wireless router, a Netgear R6250, one of their top of the range (at least when it was released, pre R7000). I am told by the old and the wise that a wireless router acts as a firewall of sorts. I wouldn’t know about that, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if some of the settings in the router were contributing to the problem.
I have just logged into the router as admin and gone through every page available, and no-where is the acronym UDP mentioned in either basic or advanced settings. I have found a single reference to “LAN TCP/IP Setup”, which includes an IP address, an IP subnet mask, a RIP direction (set to both) and a RIP Version (set to Disabled). I have no idea what all these mean, and there were no options to disable these settings (other than RIP version). The IP address and subnet mask are greyed out and uneditable. There is a reference to an internet connection port described as DHCP whatever that is (not editable).
Anyway, to cut to the chase
- there are some indications that the problems that I have with Secureline are the same as those which until now I had with ExpressVPN. They certainly presented identical symptoms.
- I have no problems if I don’t use any VPN
- I can find nowhere that I can change Secureline’s settings as I can with ExpressVPN, which corrected the problem in the latter.