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Forum Discussion
Dropbox "Connecting..." with VPN
Been using Dropbox for many years. Normally DB is connected and status is "up to date". And it had been then when I started VPN to the office, that DB would lose connection (not surprising) and would...
After 2 years, nothing has been fixed with this issue?
Jay
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorHi alturic, according to our info, there isn't an issue as such, since we would have many reports of the same nature.
Does your VPN have any settings that could be restricting traffic to the following Dropbox domains?
I'm still seeing this with 181.4.5678.
Boot computer and dropbox connects. Start VPN and dropbox is stuck in "syncing" (next local change just stays at "uploading" forever). Restart dropbox and everything is happy. Disconnect VPN and dropbox gets stuck in "syncing" again.
And "pausing" and then resuming syncing doesn't fix it either.
Sometimes I can toggle the proxy setting from auto to direct and then back to auto and then it might work. But that's successful maybe 30-50% of the time and so I usually just restart dropbox entirely.
- Yep, exact same problem here.
Using OpenVPN. Jay Thoughts?
Conditions to reproduce
Be connected to OpenVPN (unsure if this affects other VPNs or not)
Be connected to DropBox
Lose Connection/Reconnect to VPN
DropBox loses internet connection and never regains it.
In my case, it's even crazier DropBox thinks it lost connection to the internet because I don't use my VPN connection for any internet traffic outside of connecting to corporate servers. Pausing/unpausing does nothing, I have to close DropBox and reopen it and it's happy again.
- Megan
Hi alturic, I hope you're doing well!
A VPN can cause issues with the connection of the desktop app, one way or another. Maybe not at first, but initially it will.
Now, connection problems usually mean there is a proxy, firewall, antivirus or other type of security program in the way. Can you check that?Moving forward, the best way for you to get assistance might be to reach out to the company that makes your VPN for support, and ask them about this too.
- Megan,
I don’t believe my ISP or VPN provider can tell us why Dropbox loses connection when connecting to a VPN (although as a developer I can understand vaguely why) NOR would they be able to tell me why Dropbox can never reconnect after it loses connection, outside of closing and reopening Dropbox.
We’ve provided reproducible steps on how your team can track down why Dropbox has this issue, so we will have to wait until Dropbox provides a fix. I have the same issue and use ProtonVPN. Dropbox icon remains grayed out until I restart the app or disable VPN.
Still no resolution to such a simple issue. Sad. I prefer DropBox to all of the other file management solutions out there too - all of which work completely fine with connecting/disconnecting to VPNs.
And again, in my situation, my VPN is strictly routing a few IP's through it. Anything and everything related to DropBox is always routed through the default LAN connection.
