My impression after a few months

[NL99 5]

A few months ago i realized that torrenting with your isp ip is not a very good idea, so i read some stuff about vpn. Compared vpn providers and started a trial with one of the big well known providers, Easy to setup, good price, decent speeds and good support..i thought. Lots of positive reviews, must be good. So i tried it for a week. Many many servers in every part of the world..but only a few usable for p2p. Hmm well who cares, as long they are fast. But it turned out that around 40megabit was the maximum and there are no alternative ports to chose from besides the standard port. So i asked them for support, tips and tricks to get higher speeds. I was told that i should reinstall the client, and otherwise it would be my isp that is capping some ports. I stopped the trial and started looking for another provider. Someone at a techforum told me i should try a 3 days air-trial for an euro. Well why not?

 

So in installed the client , was happily surprised that i could choose the port and protocol i want to use, did some speedtesting, tried some torrents and bam! >225 megabit. So it was possible. Time to get a low-energy consuming torrentpc. Connected both the torrentpc and the desktop to a router that i configured for openvpn. Hmm 10 megabit, something must go wrong. I read some fora and learned that vpnspeed is all about cpu-power and you need some decent single core perfomance, so it`s better to turn a pc into a router/firewall and connect your lan trough that tunnel.

So i bought some new fanless mini itx hardware and an Intel dual nic and installed Pfsense, read lots of guides and how-to`s, encountered lots of problems, got some help on the airvpnforum and after a few days - connected! I`m totally noob with networkingstuff, so if i can get it working with some help and reading, i`m sure everyone can. My pfsense computer is even behind a non-bridged isp modemrouter but that seems no real problem. I can forward ports for torrents in pfsense and it works. Also have a gigabit wireless router behind the pfsense-box so my phone etc, is now behind the vpn as well.

 

Hardware:
Intel® Celeron® CPU J3355 @ 2.00GHz
Current: 2000 MHz, Max: 2001 MHz
2 CPUs: 1 package(s) x 2 core(s)
ES-CBC,AES-XTS,AES-GCM,AES-ICM
Memory usage 5% of 3715 MiB

 

Speed:
ISP: max 250mbit
Most speedtests give 200+ while connected trough vpn
Real life test: See screenshot below. Normally somewhere between 20 and 29 megabyte/s if some well seeded torrents are running. Cpu at pfsense box does 60~65% then.

 

Thanks AIR

[zhang888 1066]

Another example which shows that doing a little research, investing in good hardware with the proper OS will give you great results for many years ahead.

Enjoy.

[go558a83nk 362]

Good job!  The speed is there to be had and pfsense is great!