Troubleshooting why Third-Party VPNs won't connect

[mercerjt]

Somehow with either 13.2 or 13.2.1, my Mac won't allow any third-party VPN to work/connect right. I'm looking for any advice folks have before I throw myself at the mercy of Apple Support troubleshooting. Here's what I've tried/confirmed:

• Isolated the issue to my Mac Studio. No issue with VPNs on iPad, iPhone, spouse's MacBook Air, etc.
• Experienced the issue on my home Wifi and putting the Mac on my iPhone's cellular mobile hotspot
• Tested with ExpressVPN & NordVPN. ExpressVPN worked previously in Jan/Dec. NordVPN was a brand new install as part of my debugging to see if the issue was isolated to ExpressVPN
  • NordVPN won't even connect
  • ExpressVPN weirdly says it connects, but it seems to have a speed of 4 B/s (that's right, bytes. I mentally heard the dial-up tone as I watched that)
  • Completely removed and reinstalled them just in case
• Verified that iCloud Private Relay is turned off ("Private Relay: Off" with button available to "Turn On Private Relay")
  • Verified I *could* turn on Private Relay and appeared to work just fine when I checked the IP to see if I "looked" to a website like I was on a private relay service
• Tried doing a fresh install of Ventura (boot into recovery mode Options, click to reinstall macOS)
• No change to the default firewall options and no special antivirus software running
• Oddly, I don't get a popup from ExpressVPN or NordVPN to install any VPN configuration when they run, as their guides seem to indicate (granted guides are often slightly outdated or something in macOS changes the interface). I suspect there's some kind of plist or configuration file or just a good ol' Apple bug that's preventing the third-party VPN from making the connections

I am all ears to suggestions here. Maybe I just need to back everything up and Erase all Contents & Settings, but that's my last resort!

 

[fisherking]

have you tried contacting the developers? IVPN works here (on both my macs).

and there's probably something loading at startup (ie in HD>Library>LaunchDaemons) along with a preference file somehwere (in the main library or user library) that's saving your configuration..

 

[mercerjt]

have you tried contacting the developers? IVPN works here (on both my macs).

and there's probably something loading at startup (ie in HD>Library>LaunchDaemons) along with a preference file somehwere (in the main library or user library) that's saving your configuration..

I did with ExpressVPN but got essentially a message of "it's you not us, and we've run out of our troubleshooting steps." Which, fair, I knew it was me. I just didn't have the expertise to figure out what weird incantation I had done to cause it unfortunately.

Tried tinkering with the launchd's and getting rid of any preference files that could be related to the VPNs, but no dice. After messaging with Apple Support, I just had to Erase All Content and Settings and restart completely fresh. I tried restoring from Time Machine, but the issue came with the backup (lending credence to the hidden file thought). Thankfully, I didn't lose anything other than my time with all this between backups and living in the cloud.

 

[Somename1]

Same issue here, hard to lock on, and downloads in the mud.