Full disclosure: I am using a VPN to circumvent security measure set in place by my netadmin to torrent music.
Recently, my dad installed the OpenDNS system in our home to prevent users from accessing inappropriate, illegal, and malicious websites. I purchased one year of access from Privateinternetaccess.com and got it installed on my pc and my phone. I had wanted to set up an ArchLinux machine I had lying around as a seedbox using this VPN, but after following the instructions at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Private_Internet_Access_VPN I was still not able to bypass security, as I had on my android phone and windows PC.
I had first considered it to be a problem with NetworkManager, so I tried connman, then when that failed, I used openvpn to connect manually. However, upon trying to do so, I noticed in the openvpn verbose log that my vpn client had failed to ascertain the IP address of the remote server, finding instead the openDNS "Blocked" page.
Today, I tried a secondary workaround by pinging the target host from a computer with unfettered access, and modifying the openvpn configuration files to use the ip address rather than the proper name of the remote server. The log shows
sudo openvpn --config /etc/openvpn/US_East.conf
Sun Nov 27 16:39:49 2016 OpenVPN 2.3.13 x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu [SSL (OpenSSL)]
[LZO] [EPOLL] [PKCS11] [MH] [IPv6] built on Nov 3 2016 Sun Nov 27 16:39:49 2016 library versions: OpenSSL 1.0.2j 26 Sep 2016, LZO 2.09
Sun Nov 27 16:39:49 2016 NOTE: the current --script-security setting may allow this configuration to call user-defined scripts
Sun Nov 27 16:39:49 2016 UDPv4 link local: [undef]
Sun Nov 27 16:39:49 2016 UDPv4 link remote: [AF_INET]208.167.254.96:1198
Sun Nov 27 16:39:50 2016 [eda89b4680481f08ebe2274bb298496d] Peer Connection Initiated with [AF_INET]208.167.254.96:1198
Sun Nov 27 16:39:52 2016 TUN/TAP device tun0 opened
Sun Nov 27 16:39:52 2016 do_ifconfig, tt->ipv6=0, tt->did_ifconfig_ipv6_setup=0
Sun Nov 27 16:39:52 2016 /usr/bin/ip link set dev tun0 up mtu 1500
Sun Nov 27 16:39:52 2016 /usr/bin/ip addr add dev tun0 local 10.19.10.6 peer 10.19.10.5
Sun Nov 27 16:39:52 2016 /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf.sh tun0 1500 1558
10.19.10.6 10.19.10.5 init
dhcp-option DNS 209.222.18.222
dhcp-option DNS 209.222.18.218
Sun Nov 27 16:39:52 2016 Initialization Sequence Completed
The address of BLOCKED is 204.194.237.154
the address of the target server us-east.privateinternetaccess.com = 216.155.131.75
The next strategy I will try is to use L2TP/IPSEC using openswan, but i fear that it will go badly. I feel that no tool from linux may reach the target server, as when I was attempting to use the socks proxy provided by PIA to download the software itself, the proxy tool failed.
TL;DR VPN can't connect to remote server through OpenDNS. What do?
