The original post: /r/debian by /u/BigVikingBeard on 2025-01-29 19:31:06.

Decided to finally build up my File/Plex server at home. It’s an older tower with older hardware stuffed with a ton of HDDs. After going through the trials and tribulations of relearning all the old commands I used to know (I haven’t actively used any flavor of Linux in many years at this point), getting things set up, getting plex running, getting NoMachine running, etc etc.

It is running the latest Debian Bookworm with KDE Plasma as the window manager.

One thing that refuses to work at all is Private Internet Access. Yes, I could probably set up the OpenVPN or WireGuard options, but I’d prefer to use the app and have the easily accessible list of where I connect to and such.

When I press the button I get, “we couldn’t establish the connection to the VPN server” no matter what settings I use within PIA itself. OpenVPN protocol, WireGuard, doesn’t matter what ports, split tunnel, request a port or not, using PIAs DNS or not, nothing changes that it will not connect.

Both windows machines (current primary desktop and primary laptop) will happily connect to PIA without issue.

And here’s the fun bit. I have an older laptop that I also installed Debian Bookworm on, but used Gnome for the window manager. That laptop will allow PIA to connect without issue. I compared folder permissions, they’re the same, so I don’t think it is that. My only real hypothesis is that maybe I changed some network setting when doing the install on the desktop, and I have no idea what is it, or what it could be.

And the Gnome laptop default settings ‘app’ is incredibly light on network settings, so it’s difficult to compare them.

So I dunno. Anyone have any ideas what might be causing it to fail just on that machine?