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Comment by RandomTisk | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have a good solution for keeping VPNs connected on an iPhone? I've set one up in the past and wanted to always stay connected to my VPN server at home, but I've found the biggest challenge isn't setting up the VPN, but making sure it stays connected or reconnects when the signal is interrupted.

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Have you tried with wireguard? One nice feature of WG is that it takes almost no time to make/restore a connection. It's hard to even notice.

I use Wireguard on my iOS devices and it only needs to be restarted when the device reboots, otherwise is persistent.

If you're using an IPsec VPN, you can build a configuration profile with Apple's Configurator tool and do some neat stuff with VPNs.

I believe always-on is one option, but the option that intrigues me the most is to automatically connect when a certain domain is requested after a lookup failure. If you have an internal domain, say, ".randomtisk", you can set it to try, then connect the VPN if the DNS lookup fails - this way it will work normally at home and transparently connect to the VPN when you're away.

NOTE: I haven't actually tried this yet, it's a work in progress.

I use wireguard on: - Linux - Mac - Windows - Android

And it works pretty much the same way on all platforms, and it recovers seamlessly from switching cell phone towers and wifi APs.

You will end up with significant battery life reduction. Just saying.

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