[PLUG-TALK] PIA-daemon

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2021 05:33:02 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> dijo:

>It's an application that had to be installed. A quickie web search
>shows it can be downloaded for Chrome from google's app store.

There are two kinds of VPNs - those that work system-wide and those
that work only with browsers. The latter are installed as browser
plugins. Private Internet Access is a system-wide VPN.

>When you kill the running process the installed application spawns
>another one. You need to remove the spawner.
>
>Not knowing how you installed it I'll suggest two things to try:
>
>1. locate pia Locate is updated daily. You might have slocate
>installed. Locate is, I believe, based on the whereis command. From
>man whereis, "whereis - locate the binary, source, and manual page
>files for a command". Both locate and whereis can be run as a user, at
>least on Slackware.

The command 'locate pia' produced about 50 screens of results, because
'pia' is part of a gazillion filenames. I tried 'whereis pia' and it
returned just 'pia.' Then I tried 'sudo apt remove pia' and got 'Package
'pia' is not installed, so not removed' and ditto for pia-daemon. But I
may be getting closer with whereis:
	whereis pia-daemon
	pia-daemon: /opt/piavpn/bin/pia-daemon
If the package is named pia-daemon, why did apt not find it? Part of
the answer to that may be that searching in Synaptic for 'pia' returned
nothing.

>2. find / -name pia
>Run find as root to start the search at the root directory (/) and it
>will show you where all instances of pia are to be found. Most likely
>in /usr/local/bin/, perhaps in /usr/bin.

I tried 'sudo find / -name pia,' but had to kill it because it was
trying all my storage locations, including external ones. These include
about 50TB of data. I need to point it at just local files, but I'm
not smart enough to understand the find man page.

I wondered how it got installed, and it occurred to me that surely I
got it from PIA's website. Since forever I have kept a folder
~/Software where I keep all such stuff, so I looked there and found
pia-linux-2.6.1-05824.run (and earlier versions), plus pia-nm.sh. I
couldn't open the .run file in Mousepad because it was not UTF-8 (and I
didn't try anything else yet), but the .sh file opened, and the first
couple of lines said:
	#!/bin/bash
	# Install OpenVPN profiles in NetworkManager for PIA
I should add here that when I go into the GUI network manager system
tray icon under VPNs I find all the PIA servers still listed. I've just
been ignoring them, as I now use a different VPN.

I still haven't gotten rid of it, but I'm getting closer.