can not start vpncgw service (Debian 10)

[mr-canoehead]

can not start vpncgw service (Debian 10)

[mr-canoehead]

I have never tried running this project using Debian (only Raspberry Pi OS) so I spun up a Debian 10 VM today to try it out. When I tried to start the vpncgw service I encountered the same error as you did. I think it's a Python version issue, the long term solution is to migrate the project to Python 3 but in the meantime I was able to patch the system to get it working. Here is the workaround I used:

1. install the simplejson package:

   sudo pip install simplejson

2. modify the engine.io client:

   sudo nano /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/engineio/client.py

   change line 2 to:

   from simplejson import JSONDecodeError

3. start the vpncgw service:

   sudo systemctl start vpncgw

That should do the trick, After applying this patch the system seems to be working as expected.

- Chris

[mr-canoehead]

Update: I have migrated the project code to Python 3 and have updated the install guide, patching is no longer required for this issue. I installed a combined VPN Client Gateway + Pi-hole system in a Debian 10 VM, everything seems to be working as expected.