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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

No VPN button in Control Center? Do Apple employees use public wi-fi?

> Do Apple employees use public wi-fi?

There are apps and security profiles for that. My company uses a VPN-on-demand, where the VPN is used only for select sites when on public networks.

VPNs are configured in Settings->General. Any reason why that would need to be regularly toggled, out of interest?

I haven't used it in a while, but when I did, it wasn't very good at reconnecting after sleeping the device or switching networks.

Sounds like it may have been an issue with the remote end of the VPN tunnel then. I've been connected to VPN for days at a time, switching between Wi-Fi and cellular (including switching between IPv4-only, IPv6-only, and dual-stack networks), and have never had an issue with the device automatically re-establishing the VPN tunnel.

Of course things could have also just improved over time.

Which VPN provider or enterprise gateway? Does your VPN Profile have an "Always-On" setting? That's only available on managed devices and it ensures that no traffic is passed unless the device is connected to a VPN, which is what causes the VPN to automatically reconnect.

If you have a standalone VPN app, it may also reconnect silently. But the system VPN does not stay reliably connected across device sleep and network status changes.

You don't need managed devices. You just need to configure the VPN in the Configurator app and push a profile to your device. Though there are still some manual plist editing required to get this working.

Always-on VPN is possible on non-Supervised devices? Would appreciate a pointer to the relevant XML tags. Is it selectable, e.g. can you have multiple VPN profiles and then toggle (in Settings) which profile is Always-On?

It's not possible, but you can use VPN on Demand and it should solve the work VPN problem.

If I remember correctly you just specify the OnDemandRules key and make its value an empty array.

Yes I have multiple VPN profiles and all of them allows me to specify in Settings whether to "connect on demand."

Thanks!

OpenVPN's iOS app automatically reconnects from sleep.

I know a few people who use it a lot and toggle it based on where they are. However those people definitely aren't your average consumer types. I'd imagine probably 90% of iOS users don't even know it has a VPN toggle.

(I don't use it on cellular, do use it on insecure wifi, don't use it on some secure wifis depending on who controls it, never use it at home/parents/etc. Some days that's 4/5 toggles.)

Typically for turning it back on when it failed to automatically connect, again.

Some reasons:

  - VPNs do not stay connected
  - VPNs use a lot of battery
  - switching VPNs (e.g. work, personal)
  - mandatory for public wifi, optional elsewhere
  - some sites block VPNs (netflix, best buy, american airlines)
  - some networks block VPNs

VPNs can stay connected if configured correctly. For cases when staying connected really is an issue (non-IKEv2 MOBIKE), you can also configure it to auto-connect whenever anything tries to establish a network connection (this is misleadingly called "Connect on Demand"), though the configuration process involves pushing a profile to your device.

I use a VPN 99% of the time, but when I want to watch some Netflix I have to turn it off. Not often, but enough to appreciate a nice toggle!

I'm sure they do. Do you think most of iOS 11 users do? I'm willing to bet they don't.

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