VPN for P2P separate from VPN for web surfing?

[NaDre 157]

I apologize if I have posted this twice. I find this forum a bit confusing, and it seems my first attempts has failed. But I am not sure.

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I am using the OpenVPN client with AirVPN. I use an IP location outside of my native country for safer use of P2P. The server I use is also not in the UK or the US.

It have found that this location allows access to both BBC iPlayer in the UK and PBS in the US! But it does not allow me to stream a video from some sites in my own country that I like.

What I would like is for the VPN used by my P2P clients to be separate from the connection I use for web surfing. If I could find a good way to do this, I would look into upgrading my account so that I could have a second connection (I saw somewhere on this site that this may be possible?).

I am considering setting up a virtual machine under VMWare Player that I would use for P2P. It would use a "bridged" IP interface rather than using NAT through the host. I believe that way it could use one AirVPN connection, while on the host I could use another connection, or no connection.

This seems like a lot of hassle though. But at least I would not need a separate physical machine.

By the way, before anyone suggests it, I have a seed box. But I have large amount of stuff on USB hard drives that I want to seed that it would be impractical (and expensive) to get loaded up onto the seed box. This is why I am using AirVPN in addition to the seed box.

Can you (or anyone here) suggest a simpler way achieving my goal? Perhaps by hard coding the interfaces used by the P2P clients and removing the default gateway entry for that VPN interface? Is this practical? Or rather than remove the VPN entry, can I override it with another default gateway for my native IP interface or one for another VPN connection?

Thanks for any help you can give.

[NaDre 157]

I asked before, "Can you (or anyone here) suggest a simpler way achieving my goal? Perhaps by hard coding the interfaces used by the P2P clients and removing the default gateway entry for that VPN interface? Is this practical?"

I have found that this will work. At least with uTorrent 2.2.1. The problem is that I don't think I can count on the IP address assigned for the VPN (i.e. 10.?.?.?) always being the same. Certainly it changes when I go to another server.

I wonder though if it may not be possible for AirVPN to set things up so that the IP address of the VPN interface was always the same? Or is it possible for me to override the IP address on my PC by changing the OpenVPN configuration file? Or provide an IP address alias (using Windows 7, not Linux)? I suspect not. I will play with this though.

Does the customized AirVPN client provide anything like this? Another level of proxy running on my machine would probably do it.

Is anyone else interested in being able to do this?

[Staff 9972]

I asked before, "Can you (or anyone here) suggest a simpler way achieving my goal? Perhaps by hard coding the interfaces used by the P2P clients and removing the default gateway entry for that VPN interface? Is this practical?"

I have found that this will work. At least with uTorrent 2.2.1. The problem is that I don't think I can count on the IP address assigned for the VPN (i.e. 10.?.?.?) always being the same. Certainly it changes when I go to another server.

Hello!

On port 443 UDP your tun interfaces is DHCP pushed an address in the range 10.4.0.0/255.255.0.0. Therefore you just need to block any outgoing packet for your p2p client NOT coming from 10.4.0.0/16

Please see here:

https://airvpn.org/status

I wonder though if it may not be possible for AirVPN to set things up so that the IP address of the VPN interface was always the same? Or is it possible for me to override the IP address on my PC by changing the OpenVPN configuration file? Or provide an IP address alias (using Windows 7, not Linux)? I suspect not. I will play with this though.

The public entry and exit-IP addresses of the servers are static. The VPN IP address is DHCP assigned, it is dynamic but you can easily handle it.

Does the customized AirVPN client provide anything like this? Another level of proxy running on my machine would probably do it.

You can tell the client to tell OpenVPN to connect over an http or a socks proxy. See here for an example:

https://airvpn.org/tor

Kind regards

[NaDre 157]

I asked before, "Can you (or anyone here) suggest a simpler way achieving my goal? Perhaps by hard coding the interfaces used by the P2P clients and removing the default gateway entry for that VPN interface? Is this practical?"

I have found that this will work. At least with uTorrent 2.2.1. The problem is that I don't think I can count on the IP address assigned for the VPN (i.e. 10.?.?.?) always being the same. Certainly it changes when I go to another server.

On port 443 UDP your tun interfaces is DHCP pushed an address in the range 10.4.0.0/255.255.0.0. Therefore you just need to block any outgoing packet for your p2p client NOT coming from 10.4.0.0/16

 

I am using Windows firewall. The default set up is for outgoing rules to be allowed. I am afraid to change this. It might break Windows Update et al? So I added rules to block the other address ranges in use by interfaces on my PC. But if I do not hard code the the bind addresses for uTorrent in the "Preferences/Advanced", uTorrent will not connect properly. Vuze would not either. I tried using 10.4.0.0/16 in the clients, but that did not work. It has to be the specific IP address. of the interface.

I have realized now that the site I am most interested in will continue streaming video if I just pause torrent transfers and turn off the VPN for a moment while I start the video streaming. This is good enough for me. So I think I will drop this.

Thanks for the suggestion. It led me to learn some useful things about Windows firewall.