While Portmaster integrates deeply into the network stack of your operating system, all of it is volatile - meaning that it is automatically removed when Portmaster shuts down or when Portmaster is uninstalled.
However, there are special cases where you might loose Internet or network connectivity after shutting down or uninstalling Portmaster.
Portmaster becomes the gateway for all DNS queries when you install it, but it does not configure itself as your DNS server in the system. Rather, it does a soft integration by redirecting all DNS queries to itself.
What can happen is that at some point - while Portmaster is installed - the DNS configuration of your system is changed or corrupted into a state that does not work. But because Portmaster is installed, it will seamlessly fix it for you, because it “corrects” all queries. When you then shutdown or uninstall Portmaster this “fix” is removed and you end up with a broken DNS configuration.
Please review the DNS configuration of your system. When in doubt, set it to automatic or DHCP.
In some more extreme cases, the system might not correctly remove the integration as it should.
Portmaster marks all its network stack integrations (the Firewall Driver / Kernel Extension) as non-permanent and as such they are removed by Windows when the Portmaster shuts down or when Windows reboots.
In rare cases, however, Windows fails to correctly remove Portmaster’s network stack integration correctly, resulting in a loss of network connectivity. We have never experienced this issue ourselves and thus haven’t yet been able to take an in-depth look.
The help Windows restore network connectivity, open a Windows cmd as an Administrator and enter the following commands to reset your network. Warning: You might need to reconfigure any special network settings you had.
netsh int ip reset
netsh winsock reset catalog
After that, reboot.
If these steps did not restore network connectivity, please report this.
Portmaster adds rules to the iptables configuration in order to integrate into the network stack. These are automatically removed when Portmaster shuts down or is uninstalled. There might be rare cases, where this does not happen. Then you can remove them manually by running sudo /opt/safing/portmaster recover-iptables or restarting.
If there is another problem, you can try to restart the networking with the command sudo systemctl restart networking or the equivalent for your distribution.
If these steps did not restore network connectivity, please report this.