Day 2625: Sophos and NordVPN clashing

I’m in a hotel at the moment which is running Sophos to manage their network.

It doesn’t seem to want to play nicely with NordVPN, with sites either being outright rejected or just spinning forever.

After a bit of (vpn-less) searching on the internet I discovered that you could change a setting in the NordVPN app which kind of fixed it:

1. Open the NordVPN app
2. Click the cog in the bottom left
3. Choose settings
4. Under general, look for VPN Protocol
5. Set this to OpenVPN (TCP)

And like I said, this sort-of fixed it.

But randomly it wasn’t working when I connected.

It wasn’t until a day later that I discovered, if you use the presets to connect like Speed / Downloads / Privacy, they use their own pre-defined protocol settings.

If you’re not connected via a preset when you change it, you don’t get this notification to let you know this:

So basically the solution is:

• Follow the steps above, and
• Only connect using either quick connect or selecting a country directly, don’t use the preset as that will ignore your preferences.

If you’re staying in the location for a long time then you can update the presets as well in the app settings:

PRO TIP: Set yourself a reminder for your check-out day so that you remember to revert this change and let NordVPN auto-select the best protocol.

 

 

Day 195: Making a NumLock-locker

Geek Happiness Level: 100%

For the last 195 days I have been catching the num lock key all the time when I am typing. There is no light on it so I never knew if the numpad would be numbers or arrows when I pressed it. Annoying.

After some searching I finally found SharpKeys which lets you remap keys on your keyboard. So I have set num lock to always-on at boot and then disabled that key totally.