I’ve been putting off renewing my mullvad membership because of the port forwarding thing. I only want to use it for torrenting. Is it really crucial to find a VPN that supports port forwarding? If so, what’s the go to option now that it’s becoming increasingly uncommon?
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If you care about seeding you need it. If you don’t you’re fine but come on, you know you should care lol.
I use PIA, probably the cheapest option out there and it does have PF.
Is PIA still supporting Gab? They are burnt for me since they actively advertised them as affiliates…
What’s gab?
It’s a fascist social network
One important aspect is that two peers without port forwarding will never be able to connect to each other. This is important for torrents with low amount of peers. Unless a connectable peer comes in to essentially relay data by grabbing the content from the other person and then seeding to you, you won’t be able to download. For popular torrents with plenty of connectable peers to go around this is less of an problem, it will only cause some performance issues.
This isn’t quite true, if three peers support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Transport_Protocol, a third peer that has a port forward can act as a STUN server for the two peers without and let them connect directly to each other.
I don’t know how well it works in practice, but Transmission supports it so I’ll rely on it while this whole PF business settles down.
You may notice slower speeds and difficulties downloading rare stuff. Generally, you’ll probably be OK if you’re looking for well-seeded files.
See here for a bit better explanation.
From what I’ve gathered certain really illegal content was being created and uploaded; and paid for using crypto. It really is a harsh shame to people who have obscure files or services and have been using the service for more than 5 years. I think they should reevaluate their policy and allow registered non-crypto accounts to have access to it after a certain period of time. Simply removing the feature is unacceptable; I put my trust in IVPN after much research. I’m concerned about how the other providers will handle the windfall of new users signing up for the feature and if they will keep it active.
Port forwarding lets you connect with a peer that doesn’t have port forwarding basically. You may not notice a difference.
Quote from some old guide:
Thanks for the explanation! First time I have somewhat understood what port forwarding does for torrents.
How will this work if you are behind double NAT by your isp
I notice the difference with it off. Its shit without it. I get no incoming connections to existing torrents I’m seeding and when I add a new magnet link it just stays stuck on obtaining metadata and never Downloads.
When I have the port forwarded it runs like clockwork.
My setup is containerized with a gluetun container acting as the VPN network and the interface binded inside the qbittorrent container. .
I’m using gluetun with AirVPN and my transmission containers’s connection to peers isn’t great. I have port forwarding enabled (verified working using the test button in transmission). But I can connect to 0 or 1 peer out of 12 on a specific torrent, and without the VPN I can immediately connect to 6 peers.
Did you do anything tricky with your container stack that isn’t part of the gluetun guide?
It is not required but you will have a much better torrenting experience by being connectable (port forwarded). When you are fully connectable you are able to make direct connections to all peers in torrent swarms so overall your upload/download speeds would be faster and you can still participate in small torrent swarms.
When you are firewalled (not port forwarded) you can only make direct connections to peers that themselves are connectable (port forwarded).
In practice when you are in large torrent swarms it may not make much difference, there’s often plenty of connectable peers in large torrent swarms that you can connect with. However in smaller torrent swarms if no one is connectable then all the firewalled peers can only see each other, no data will transfer. They are all stuck waiting for a connectable peer to join the swarm & help with the data transfer.
removed by mod
Now it makes sense why when occasionally my VPN will stop when I’m downloading, and I’m able to get a bunch more connections than usual.
I think you should try to find a VPN that supports it, but you can live without it if you have to.
If you don’t have a listening port other clients can’t request a connection. You can still limp along without accepting incoming connection requests and it may not even make a big difference. Still it’s a lot better to have it. You’ll connect to more peers.
BTW, It’s not always necessary to use port forwarding to enable a listening port, but commonly it is. Machines with a public facing IP don’t need to use port forwarding, but most people are either on a private network or VPN where it’s required.
Aside from torrent the other p2p where an open port can be important is Soulseek, you could be blacklisted by users from downloading pretty quickly if you don’t/can’t share music.
I switched to mullvad a few months back and what I noticed coming from AirVPN is how much less captcha requests I get, I’m not much into p2p so I’ll probably stay with them.
Yup! And not even just torrents/Soulseek, other p2p apps like eMule also require incoming ports for the best performance.
… okay, okay cue the “people still use eMule?” comments :D
Wait…soulseek is still a thing???
Oh yeah, very much so.
It’s crucial when the only seeder won’t open their port.
My opinion: I wish qbittorrent 4.6 would release sooner, it comes with I2P support, which I’ve seen discussed on lemmy a few times.
4.6 is now at beta1 which is by far and large usable. I think the 4.6 branch will take some time to stablize as it is moving to the libtorrent 2.x branch (from which I2P support comes). Their most recent 2.0.9 has just fixed some I2P related bugs.
Is there an ETA or something? I am waiting on it at the moment, but I don’t know their release schedule or anything
It’s important for rare/poorly seeded torrents, but not at all important if it’s a new release movie or something like that which will be well seeded.
For me it’s incredibly important. If I don’t have port forwarding my status on qbit is restricted and I get like 10% of the speed I do when it’s open. This is for big torrents
True but this’ll only work long term if you download every new thing that you’ll want to watch now or sometime down the road.
How does port forwarding work if you have multiple torrent clients on the same network, all sharing a public IP?
You put them on different ports and make multiple forwards, one for each.
Each peer can choose any port they want – to open to the swarm. You’re not restricted to one particular port, so there’s no need to clash with another per on your network. The defaults in the settings are merely suggestions.
I think it just makes you more discoverable to other peers for dl/seeding, don’t quote me on that I might be misremembering
No you don’t need port forwarding
I’m more concerned with the fact that they’re removing features without reducing price or making up for it elsewhere. I have no desire to support that business when there are perfectly fine alternatives.
5€ is already dirt cheap. If you have another ~ 5€ service that can max out my 1 Gbps connection when I download, I am all ears.
Would you mind making some examples please?
I use PIA (probably the cheapest out there). If you just care about torrenting, they’re quite good. I can saturate my Gbit connection and they offer PF (only for p2p applications though)
I tried getting port forwarding to work with PIA, but it seems to be unavailable within the US. Has that been the case for you as well? Not sure if it’d be worth using an international server with 1/10 the speed in order to enable port forwarding, but I would love to be able to be connectable.
How do you use it? Why do you say it is not available? I am in Europe but I’ve never seen anybody report what you’re saying.
Like I said, it is limited to p2p applications. You cannot host a web server or something similar.
Try using this instead of the app
https://github.com/thrnz/docker-wireguard-pia
It’s a lot more technical but it’s worth trying.
I’m actually using that exact same docker image :) port forwarding still doesn’t work within the US though. I love the speeds I get from Wireguard compared to OpenVPN though.
https://lemmy.world/post/698471
ProtonVPN and AirVPN off the top of my head.
ProtonVPN has dynamic port forwarding via a Windows client (or a python script if on Linux). Just a heads up, since it could be awkward to work out if you’re downloading from a headless server.
I’ve heard AirVPN is good. I switched to iVPN and I’m satisfied
Heads up if you don’t already know, IVPN recently announced they are dropping port forwarding like Mullvad recently did. https://www.ivpn.net/blog/gradual-removal-of-port-forwarding/
Oh motherfucker
AirVPN I guess then
I’ve been using airvpn for years, no complaints.
Oyoyoy. What then?
Moved from mulvad to ivpn and now what?
Usenet
If you want to run a seedbox behind a VPN (like I do) then you’d want to be connectable, so a VPN with portforwarding would be crucial. I run my own OpenVPN server on a public VPS (so a dedicated IP instead of shared IP) but I only use private trackers so a dedicated IP is fine and also technically required, so my local seedbox whitebox server connects to my OpenVPN server as an OpenVPN client, and tunnels all traffic over the VPN with an iptables prerouting rule on my public VPS for the traffic on my qbtorrent-nox inbound port to reach my local server.
This way I can run whatever hardware I want in my seedbox and have full control over the hardware while also masking my home IP.
Let me know if you want a year subscription to Speedify. It came bundled in a Humble Bundle ages ago and I have never used it since I have a lifetime subscription to Windscribe.