Somehow with either 13.2 or 13.2.1, my Mac won't allow any third-party VPN to work/connect right. I'm looking for any advice folks have before I throw myself at the mercy of Apple Support troubleshooting. Here's what I've tried/confirmed:
- Isolated the issue to my Mac Studio. No issue with VPNs on iPad, iPhone, spouse's MacBook Air, etc.
- Experienced the issue on my home Wifi and putting the Mac on my iPhone's cellular mobile hotspot
- Tested with ExpressVPN & NordVPN. ExpressVPN worked previously in Jan/Dec. NordVPN was a brand new install as part of my debugging to see if the issue was isolated to ExpressVPN
- NordVPN won't even connect
- ExpressVPN weirdly says it connects, but it seems to have a speed of 4 B/s (that's right, bytes. I mentally heard the dial-up tone as I watched that)
- Completely removed and reinstalled them just in case
- Verified that iCloud Private Relay is turned off ("Private Relay: Off" with button available to "Turn On Private Relay")
- Verified I *could* turn on Private Relay and appeared to work just fine when I checked the IP to see if I "looked" to a website like I was on a private relay service
- Tried doing a fresh install of Ventura (boot into recovery mode Options, click to reinstall macOS)
- No change to the default firewall options and no special antivirus software running
- Oddly, I don't get a popup from ExpressVPN or NordVPN to install any VPN configuration when they run, as their guides seem to indicate (granted guides are often slightly outdated or something in macOS changes the interface). I suspect there's some kind of plist or configuration file or just a good ol' Apple bug that's preventing the third-party VPN from making the connections