NordVPN Meshnet on Raspberry Pi Breaks Internet Routing

[medienJan]

I am following NordVPN's official tutorial to set up Meshnet on a Raspberry Pi as a VPN router. When the Pi is not connected to a Meshnet device, it has decent internet speed and everything works as it should be. However, as soon as I connect it to another Meshnet device:

✅ Google services (Google Search, YouTube, Gmail) work perfectly (I can confirm, that the Google traffic is correctly routed through my windows machine my pi is connected to over Meshnet.)
❌ Other websites are incredibly slow or do not load at all
❌ Any speedtest or dns leak services do not load
❌ Traceroute gets stuck after the first hop (100.x.x.x)

Steps to reproduce:
I followed exactly the manual provided by NordVPN. I went the Network Manager route, as I did not work with RaspAP at all.

I would really appreciate some help as I have now spend multiple nights trying to get this thing going.

[mariusSincovici]

Hi,
thanks for your feedback.

This is a bit strange, that some traffic is working fine, while others not.

Could you please give us some more information about your setup:

• is windows system in the same LAN like the Pi?
• is the Windows machine connected to the VPN? Or the results or the same with or without VPN?
• did you've tried to route the traffic from Windows to Pi, to see if you can reproduce the same behavior?
• have you've tried to route traffic from Pi through another Linux machine instead of Windows?

Thanks

[medienJan]

I'll provide that information as soon as possible. As I am currently not at home it'll take some more days.

[medienJan]

I have some updates on the issue:

1. Due to my home network setup, I can only test with devices on the same network or through my phone’s hotspot via a cellular connection. In the scenario I described, both the Windows machine and the Raspberry Pi were on the same network.
2. Neither device was connected to a VPN; I was only using the Meshnet feature.
3. I successfully routed traffic through the Raspberry Pi using Meshnet from multiple devices, including an iPhone, MacBook, and Windows machine.
4. I also tested routing between two Raspberry Pis, and it appears to work as expected. In the coming days, I'll try testing between two different networks. However, when attempting to connect to the Windows machine again, the issue persists—it no longer works.

As for now, this is fine for me, as the Windows machine was only a stand-in for another Raspberry Pi. Maybe my Windows machine has some unusual network configurations. Anyway, thanks for the help!