VPN and port forwarding

svotay@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Technology@beehaw.org – 21 points –

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/969323

I am looking to buy a VPN subscription, and im interested in getting one that allows port forwarding. Found a few that still allows this, including pure VPN and air VPN which seem to offer good value for money, at least on the the long term plans. Any feedback on these two?

I used to have nordvpn, and used it for 3 years, and once that subscription ran out, have been using mullvad so far. Performance wise mullvad hasnt disappointed me or anything, but now im looking to find one that allows port forwarding.

I also have a doubt regarding the whole port forwarding thing, does the VPN having this feature enable to do it even if my ISP doesnt allow port forwarding? From the videos and articles I read, VPN port forwarding is just something you do inside their native apps and such, so if the ISP hasnt enabled port forwarding for me (which I know it hasnt, because tried to get jellyfin working the other day, and couldnt get the ports to open even after setting everything up in my router), will I still be able to do it? I tried searching around with this query, but didnt really find anything.

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I would go with Tailscale over ZeroTier though. Tailscale should perform better because it uses WireGuard as its protocol and WireGuard is extremely efficient.

No experience with Tailscale, but can confirm that performance-wise, WireGuard is a huge improvement over any other mainstream VPN protocol. It's also pretty robust and generally easier to use.

When configured and tuned properly, I've seen WireGuard able to move data at a little bit better than 90% of the provisioned bandwidth of the line. This in of itself is amazing and an order of magnitude better than OpenVPN or even IPSEC considering the overhead that encryption introduces into the packet size. Also, if you consider extra data processing going on, i.e. packets are being encapsulated, encrypted, transmitted, decrypted, and de-encapsulated, this is even more amazing.

Oh is that so, I didnt try tailscale yet. When I tried to figure out what to do with zerotier, not sure what I was planning to use it for then, it felt like I am in over my head a little bit. Is tailscale somewhat straightforward to set up/learn?

These two form a "mesh VPN" which use direct encrypted links between any number of devices. You can think of it as forming a virtual LAN where you can communicate with devices, including open ports. A lot of them have clever tricks to overcome CG-NATs, which you seem to be struggling with.

Another option is to just rent a server. You can get massive storage space for less than some VPNs cost and you don't need powerful hardware if your device supports the codecs you're using. You could even get a cheapy VPS and reverse proxy to your Jellyfin server through an SSH tunnel or similar. Lots of options here.

I would recommend hosting a wireguard server yourself instead of using tailscale or zerotier (both go through their own servers with your data, instead of your data remaining within your reach). Wireguard is really easy to deploy using docker using the wg-easy image.

I would recommend proton, airvpn or cryptostorm if you need port-forwarding. PureVPN has a history of logging, which is a big no-no for your privacy.

I've used Windscribe since they debuted, they're pretty solid.

I recently got on a CG/NAT which also doesn't have port forwarding. I believe what you will want (in my case, can't speak for other VPN's) is to get a static IP and set up port forwarding from there, which would bypass the issues we have.

So, do you mean getting a subscription for a static IP from the ISP? Yeah that would be a solution indeed, but I am not staying where I am currently for an extended period, so maybe it isnt ideal for me. That was what felt appealing to me about having something like this with a VPN subscription, it would mean I can avail it wherever I physically am, and without having to give any consideration to whether my ISP at the moment allows me to or not.

Sorry for the misunderstanding, no, you can get a static IP from Windscribe :) your location will be irrelevant, it's just your own personal static IP :)

I put down money to try a couple of VPNs for a month each recently and PureVPN was much easier to get port forwarding working on. The only downside is that it costs extra. I also paid a lil extra to have a dedicated vpn IP since it makes DNS stuff easier

I recommend Torguard. Works great for me.

I used to use it, good service, no complaints apart from their 99% downtime on their SOCKS5 proxies, but I left because I do not like the admins. They act like children, even in support tickets.

just an fyi, not shitting on their products (apart from socks5)

From a privacy perspective I would only recommend VPNs that accept anonymous crypto payments. And that's a small list.

https://kycnot.me/services#VPN

Looks like only Azire still offers port forwarding

May I ask what your end goal is? This will help me offer a recommendation. What would you like to do? Host Jellyfin for friends?

To be frank, I dont have any particular need for a VPN other than torrenting and bypassing geographical restriction in a general way. The jellyfin experiment was to just be able to share my media across the web, so that people I know can access my media, music, mostly. Even the selection of a VPN isnt that urgent as I have a shared seedbox with seedbox.eu so that I can download torrents safely. Since I have been using a VPN for some years now, I thought id keep one handy, and when I was reading up about port forwarding, I thought maybe that could be useful, for jellyfin and such.

My doubt arose from these VPN services proclaiming they allow port forwarding, and knowing my ISP has disabled it, I was curious whether that will affect my ability to avail port forwarding via the VPN service.

If you'd like to make Jellyfin, or another service for that matter, I suggest looking at something like Tailscale or ZeroTier. Basically these create overlay private networks. There is a rather generous free tier of use.

Yeah, Zerotier was something I did come across a while ago, I will try to learn how to setup my jellyfin in combination with something like that. Thanks for your help.