TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

 TL;DR:  It's not good. Fed up with PIA , I decided to try another VPN.  I thought it might be easiest. I wanted Hotspot Shield, but the fact that they log personally identifiable information, don't support pfsense and have no live support were deal-breakers.  I wanted it set up immediately.   I decided to bite the bullet and go with ExpressVPN.   More expensive, but most said they were next fastest, they had 24/7 support and supported DD-WRT (for now) and pfsense (for future).   I ponied up and got a login.  I had to run their app momentarily to find the fastest server, then I set it all up. Any it worked!  All my smart devices reconnected, all my strange connectivity issues went away.    However, I couldn't find the nameservers for secure DNS protection.  I asked their chat, and they didn't know what I meant. Turns out, ExpressVPN doesn't support this.  They do allow manual configuration (on DD-WRT or whatever), bu...

Short answer:  You can't. Wish I'd known this before spending half a weekend figuring out how to change client DNS servers by MAC or IP address. If you try to reset your router or PC to the OpenDNS DNS server addresses, it will not work.  DNSleak will still report you using the PIA DNS server(s) associated with PIA, such as 209.222.18.218. The reason is that PIA forces you to use these servers.  From the OpenDNS support system: DNS Servers Keep Changing Away from OpnDNS Automatically 3) 209.222.18.222 and 209.222.18.218: You are currently using a privateinternetaccess VPN service. This service's VPN client automatically sets your DNS servers to 209.222.18.222 and 209.222.18.218 and cannot be changed while you are connected to the VPN. Unfortunately, there is no way around this, and you will be unable to use OpenDNS while connected to this type of VPN client. Solutions: Cease using privateinternetaccess for VPN service and switch providers to one that suppor...