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Hi,

 

I'm using Eddie 2.13.6 on Debian. In the fall, I received a DMCA notice when I accidentally launched my torrent client while AirVPN was not running. To avoid this mistake in the future, I set the qBittorrent configuration setting "Network Interface" to tun0.

 

The other day, I was having trouble accessing a website and thought they might be throttling/blocking the AirVPN server I was using, so I temporarily disconnected AirVPN and disabled the network lock. It seems that qBittorrent leaked over my wlan0 interface during this time, since I received another DMCA notice.

 

Any suggestions on how I might safely configure my torrent client to cease all communication when the VPN is not enabled? Or maybe a way to temporarily configure only a single application (my Internet browser) to communicate outside of the Network Lock?

 

Thanks.

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Thing is, that once you disconnect from AirVPN tun0 doesn't exist anymore. If you want to be safe, I would create persistent firewall rules that block all outgoing connections except to AirVPN servers via tun interface. If you sometimes want or need to disconnect from AirVPN, I would use qbittorrent in a virtual machine that is configured to only allow connections to AirVPN servers. To configure a single application to not communicate via the OpenVPN routes is possible but not easy to achieve on GNU/Linux. Afaik, your best bet is a configuration via cgroups. I have written an app that has this feature while also persistently locking down your internet connection even if you are not connected via OpenVPN. I described it in more detail in this thread.

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Thing is, that once you disconnect from AirVPN tun0 doesn't exist anymore. If you want to be safe, I would create persistent firewall rules that block all outgoing connections except to AirVPN servers via tun interface. If you sometimes want or need to disconnect from AirVPN, I would use qbittorrent in a virtual machine that is configured to only allow connections to AirVPN servers. To configure a single application to not communicate via the OpenVPN routes is possible but not easy to achieve on GNU/Linux. Afaik, your best bet is a configuration via cgroups. I have written an app that has this feature while also persistently locking down your internet connection even if you are not connected via OpenVPN. I described it in more detail in this thread.

Great idea! A virtual machine seems like overkill, but it looks like other have successfully used Docker containers to restrict specific applications to the OpenVPN tunnel interface:

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/6uhmlj/anyone_else_using_a_vpnd_virtual_machine_to/dlsv6oj/

https://github.com/MarkusMcNugen/docker-qBittorrentvpn

 

I'll take a look at your solution as well. Thanks for your help!

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I would, however, never quite trust qbittorrent to detect such changes and honor your settings under all circumstances...

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If you were using Windows you could use Windows firewall to block the qBittorrent executable file from sending or receiving on the real interface. Windows firewall allows a block based on the executable file name.

 

For Linux, you could try telling qBittorent to use a specific outgoing port (Options/Advanced/Outgoing ports ...). Then you could use iptables (or maybe some GUI front-end) to block traffic to either qBittorrent's incoming port or outgoing port on the real interface. I don't have a sample of the necessary iptables commands to give you though (I don't use qBittorent and I don't have a desktop installed on any of my Linux installations). Hopefully qBittorent can be trusted to use the outgoing port you specify.

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Yes, but you would have to be careful that Eddie does not interfere with your firewall rules. I would not say that a virtual machine is overkill. Using virtualbox you can set a GNU/Linux machine up in a matter of minutes (if you are not familiar with GNU/Linux I would give Kubuntu or Mint a try). Sometimes I have three VMs running in parallel on a midrange notebook. Performance and overhead shouldn't be an issue for qBittorrent, only graphic-intensive applications usually suffer (because of the lack of proper virtual video drivers).

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