Nothing happening

[frutti93]

Describe the Bug

Unfortunately there is not a lot to describe. I am using a somewhat exotic setup, deploying pangolin using rootless podman quadlets on nixos. However, the setup is working with public ressources and everything is running smoothely. Firewall is open on UDP Ports 51820 and 21820 and TCP Ports 80 and 443.

I just installed the Android App and setup the device, which works great, the device shows up in Pangolin and gets added to my organizations. However, when I try to connect, nothing happens except for the button in the app moving. It stays at disconnected, also in the web UI. What I tried:

1. Debug mode on panglin server shows a single request to 2026-01-31T07:39:44+00:00 [debug]: GET /api/v1/
2. Debug mode on gerbil does not show anything
3. Turning on the logs in the app does not help, no logfiles are created

Is there anything else I can try to debug this? The only thing that comes to mind is trying to setup a new pangolin instance using the standard installer and see if anything is different. But I basically translated the installer for my setup, so I cannot see how this would make a difference...

Edit: I should add: The app did not ask for any permissions after opening and installing, maybe this is the issue?

Environment

• OS Type & Version: nixos unstable
• Pangolin Version: EE-1.15.1
• Gerbil Version: 1.3.0
• Traefik Version: 3.6
• Newt Version: 1.9.0
• Client Version: Android, 0.1.4 on Android 15, Samsung Galaxy S21 5G

To Reproduce

Setup as described above with the same phone model and versions, see if it works.

Expected Behavior

Client should connect.

[HomelabHaven]

Hello @frutti93 ,
do you by any chance have DNS override and DNS over tunnel activated in the android app?
There is an ongoing dns resolution problem with the pangolin android app if both DNS override and DNS over tunnel are enabled simultaneously and an FQDN (instead of the public IP address) is used for the gerbil base_endpoint value in the pangolin config.yml.
Check out #11
The issue has been closed but there is still an active investigation being conducted.

[frutti93]

Funny coincidence, I actually just solved my problem yesterday :)
Turns out I had another VPN set as "Always on" on my phone. Even though I had turned it off manually, the setting was still there and this completely breaks the app. There are no notifications, logs cannot be enabled and the connect button moves, but nothing happens. Turning the "Always on" setting off for the other app immediately let a pop-up appear in the pangolin app and everything else worked from there (except some firewall stuff on my Newt client, but that is a problem of my weird setup).

I am not sure if I should close the issue now, because I still think there should be some kind of hint on how to fix this in the app. I will maybe just leave it open to be closed by one of the maintenaners if they decide it is something worth looking into.

[oschwartz10612]

Hey, could you turn on the logs in the settings of the android app, try to connect and then send me the logs? Is it stuck in registering or it does not even get there? Were you prompted to install the VPN extension into Android?

[frutti93]

Unfortunately I tried turning on the logs, but as with the connect button, it has no effect. It looks like the app is stuck trying to get some VPN permissions which are blocked by the "Always On" setting of the other VPN app.
As long as the "Always On" for the other VPN app is activated, not a single button seems to work. It let's me sign into my Pangolin instance, but that's about it...
After deactivating the "Always On" for the other VPN app, I get a Popup that Pangolin wants to be installed as VPN and after this everything seems to work.

[cubargh]

I had to remove always on from Tailscale to be able to set Pangolin, if not I'm not prompted to configure the VPN. Also android says pangolin doesn't support always on, can this be added?