atypdev | Post | Workaroundception: How I Got Discord Back on My Home Network

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Recently, and for seemingly no reason at all, my home network, supplied by the mysterious conglomerate known as Comcast, started blocking all my requests to Discord; a chat app I use for a concerning amount of every day to keep in touch with friends near and far. This is how I circumvented this block and the very dumb path it took to get here at all :)

“Just unblock it!”

You don’t get a golden sticker for that one, and you’re lucky I’m even acknowledging you. Put your hand down, I’ll explain everything…

The Xfinity home internet solution for network management has, safely said, to have suffered a catastrophic blow in recent years, all thanks to the dreaded Xfinity app:

Courtesy of user u/tonynca on r/Comcast, I can safely point their wise words to express my frustrations for me:

The old app was better. The bot inside the app is a potato. Why does Comcast constantly find new ways to piss off their customers? It’s unreal how this company could be so incompetent, yet we have to shove their service down our throat because of zero competition.

Source (plenty of similar feelings in the comments :3)

Say goodbye to most functionality useful to us nerds such as port forwarding, DMZs, and even basic diagnostics available previously in the Administration panel still on all routers but stripped down to its most basic functions.

Beyond this say goodbye to most functionality useful to ANYONE; the app barely even functions as an app, period. Constant authentication issues, freezes, unintuitive design, and non-functional tooling all coalesce into a primary reason why Comcast is rated the “worst customer satisfaction rating of any company or government agency in the country, including the Internal Revenue Service.”

Source (They have their own Wiki LMAO)

Having logged in, having talked to the AI assistant, and using every combination of search terms related to my predicament possible, I was unable to find a rule, setting, or anything that could help me understand:

If Discord is Blocked
Why Discord is Blocked
How to Block an App on my devices at all
How to contact a human about my issue

Color me surprised. A company that will change a customer’s name to ‘Asshole Brown’ (Yes, really.) can just barely function. Service outages, increased customer surveillance, and the lockdown of personal use tools… I can only do a little but get a new provider.

The Part That Will Get Me Banned

So, I started brainstorming… what am I good at and what can I do?

The answers I came up with were:

Not much
Not much

What I am good at is networking. What could help is a VPN.

I have a Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosted for free on Oracle Cloud for super small web-based or network-heavy projects. For example, I’d previously used the VPS as a proxy for my Minecraft server by tunneling the ports from my home network to the cloud one, and passing the cloud IP address to “strangers”. This time, I want to set up a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to tunnel my home traffic to the cloud server, skipping any invisible Xfinity blocks that may be in place.

This does raise an issue, however. If every app is tunneled, then all my activity is routed through the VPS; platforms like Reddit are familiar with Oracle Cloud’s abuse (it being free and all) and have all their public VPS IPs blocked.

The Part That Will Likely Break

A solution for this has to do with the concept of “per-application split tunnels”, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. You can have per-application tunnels split off from the rest of your traffic: I can have only Discord connect to the VPN.

I used a project called TunnlTo to give me the power to enable per-application “split-tunnel” on my Windows system.

NOTE: Somewhat deceptively, various Windows articles suggest that using the PowerShell command Add-VpnConnectionTriggerApplication-Name will enable this feature. This, however simply enables the VPN system-wide when the application is started and will not tunnel the data from the application exclusively.

So, using this awesome script to install and configure Wiregaurd for my VPS, moving the configuration files to my local machine on the problematic network and enabling the split-tunneling feature, I am now able to access Discord properly ^w^

Additionally, I decided to add a config for my phone as well, which through the stock Wiregaurd Android app I was able to include only the Discord app on the list of tunneled apps.

Now I can finally chat to my Discord kitten(s) once again, and am free from these shackles of poor design <3