Is Port Forwarding Offered?

[falk0069]

Is it possible to set (and use) the incoming connections port over the VPN in our p2p applications? I know from experience that p2p can be extremely slow if this is not used. Other VPN providers offer a port forwarding option to address this.  Any comments on this?

Thanks

[Furryness]

use bolehroute and disable proxy setting in p2p client
but all your connection will go through bolehroute

[falk0069]

hmm, I don't quite understand.  Does this mean that if I set port 12345 as my incoming connection port, it would get used by the outside world?  The way I understand it is the VPN IP we get is shared, so someone from the outside world would not be able to connect to us unless port forwarding was offered. 

In other words, are we basically behind a firewall?  If two people are behind a firewall and tried using bit-torrent technology they would not be able transfer files unless at least one of them had a direct port access. 

So basically I don't want to have to rely on others providing the direct port access, because it makes seeding almost impossible.

[Reuben]

Well i mean if you use bolehroute ports 1024-65000 are open meaning you can configure any of these ports to forward just as if you weren't behind a VPN.

[falk0069]

Ah, I get it now, Thank! 

It also helps that I found more info about bolehroute in the installation section:
http://www.bolehvpn.net/serv_bolehvpn_inst03.html

I guess bolehroute will make you fully connectible from the Internet, but you are going to suffer with higher latency and all programs will be using it.  So, this basically sounds like a dedicated IP.

It would be nice to have a happy medium where only a couple of ports could be fully connectible.  Will anything like this be offered?  It would definitely be less hacker prone.

[Reuben]

Well i think hacker protection is not one of our primary functions and even in our current configuration we have ppl struggling to figure out which port to portforward and the use of BolehRoute, giving a fixed range of open ports will further add complexity to the mix.

It is my opinion that BolehVPN's purpose is to provide privacy and encryption and should put the person in the same position if he was NOT using a VPN in relation to port security. In other words, by using a VPN he's no worse off. In fact he's in a better position with VPN because ports 1-1024 where many important services lie are blocked already.

It's a fine balance and we rather have the user choose how to protect his ports using his own firewall or etc etc since most users in general can't be bothered with this and rather have the user friendliness of having all these ports secured. Note that all key ports from 1-1024 which most services are on are blocked.

[falk0069]

Excellent point about the low ports being blocked--I failed to realize that.  I guess the only other reason port forwarding might be useful is so you could get more re-use out of IP addresses, which I'm sure you got that all figured out.

I'll give a week trial a shot and see how it goes.  Thanks for your patience.

[Reuben]

Have delivered your keys

[falk0069]

Wow, I must say this is amazing!  The speed is blazing.  I capped my at utorrent at 400 kB/s, since I rarely need anything faster than that, and I don't want to be a network abuser. 

One thing I noticed, though, is for some reason when I was using the bolehroute, utorrent was still accepting some network connections to my non-VPN interface.  What I did to fix this was I set net.bind_ip and net.outgoing_ip to the VPN IP in the advanced properties of utorrent. 

I then took it a step further and updated my routing table so the VPN was no longer my default network, but rather my local home network 192.168.0.0:
route add 128.0.0.0 mask 128.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 metric 1
route add 0.0.0.0 mask 128.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 metric 1

I'm still experimenting with this but it is looking really promising. 

It is going to be a pleasure doing business with you.

Thank you

[Furryness]

maybe you did not disable DHT
DHT tends to leak out of the vpn connection

[falk0069]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I double checked and DHT, Peer Discovery, and Peer Exchange are all disabled.  I'm thinking maybe the tracker info might have be outdated with some of the peers and they were still trying to connect to my 'old' IP address.  I think I'm ok with setting the advanced setting in utorrent for now, so it doesn't even listen on my physical network interface.  I'll figure something out that works for me.
Thanks