PIA VPN Split Tunnel

General Help
1

New to linux/Zorin. I was previously able to set up my Private Internet Access VPN to allow Firefox to go around the VPN/use split tunneling. I needed this in order to access my outlook.live.com email account which doesn't like seeing VPNs. I was able to find the executable and tell PIA to allow it to bypass. After a while Firefox was unable to update and I uninstalled it and re-installed it using the 'Software' app which seems to get Firefox from Flatpak. Finding the executable (org.mozilla.firefox) using Search in a file manager window seems to work (shows up in /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin) but when I add it to PIA's split tunnel and tell it to bypass, it's still behind the VPN encryption. Is this the wrong file/executable? I can't find another with Search. Does this have something to do with the way Flatpak works? Why did it work before? I think it was the default Firefox installation in Zorin... I've also tried using the system monitor to find the Firefox executable but it says it's in "/app/lib/firefox/" but there is no such directory...

Thanks!

2

Just wanting to make sure, you're setting specifically using this to allow it through?

/var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/org.mozilla.firefox

Personally I would either download the newer version from mozilla directly, or setup their ppa to use with the system, that way you can get newer versions of firefox. This may be a case of flatpaks causing an issue, which if it were, you could try using Flatseal to adjust permissions, but I haven't used PIA before so I'm unsure of the steps involved in that route to make it work.

3

Yes, the location and file you note is the one I used. I will try downloading directly. Thanks!

2 Likes
4

If it works by reinstalling from Mozilla's official repositories, I would still raise a support ticket with PIA VPN about it anyway. Maybe it's a bug on their end, or it may be related to the Flatpak sandbox...