As the title says, I attempted to set up Surfshark Wireguard VPN, logged in with my Surfshark account as requested and went to select a country and location. After selecting this I kept getting ‘fail’ messages, despite trying other locations, but worst of all, I suddenly lost all connection to the router interface and could not get back in.
This is really annoying as I had top reset the whole router and restore configuration to get back in. Lost all my Adguard home settings, as it seems none of these are saved with the standard router backup. Lesson learned, assume nothing when it comes to backing up, so will have to ensure a manual backup of custom filters, which took me hours to build up. A warning for others here…
I’ve self-solved this, but for any newbies out there, make sure:
Turn off Adguard Home temporarily first before setting up VPN configuration in case it interferes.
From the VPN Dashboard, make sure you are in POLICY mode not the default GLOBAL mode. This was my mistake, which immediately puts all devices into the VPN tunnel, so if anything goes toes up, you’ll be locked out.
Next use the ‘VIA’ option on the first Row to select ‘include’ or Exclude’ devices. Personally, for me it was easier to specific devices that I didn’t want through, like my PC, so I didn’t lose control to the router GUI.
Next I went to the Wireguard CLIENT and did not select my Provider (Surfshark), but chose to create a new Provider, name it what you want, and then use the downloaded configuration file from your VPN provider to set this up, rather than the automated feature in the router, as if this hangs, it can cause problems.
After a check, go back to the VPN dashboard and toggle the VPN switch ON.
That should be everything. You can then add or remove devices in the dashboard as you need.