ANSWERED Help with Airvpn torrent client not working on pi 5

[refract-hurled 0]

Hello everyone! First time working with a VPN.

I am attempting to get Airvpn working with a raspberry pi 5 with torrenting. Before attempting anything on the raspberry pi 5, I got Airvpn working on a windows machine with the Eddie client and qbittorrent successfully, I set up the port forwarding and binned the qbittorrent to the eddie network interface in the options and set the port forwarding number to align with airvpn.

At that point I felt I could try setting it up on my raspberry pi 5. I attempted to download the Eddie UI VPN but it would be stuck at "Initialize UI" and found this thread indicating there were issues with running the GUI on pi 5 and suggested using the eddie CLI. I couldn't get the CLI to work; it would tell me "Wrong login/password" even after deleting the defualt.profile that was suggested in other thread but no success.

I tried the airvpn suite and had success with the goldcrest CLI wrapper. I don't entirely understand all the differences are between all the commands the airvpn suite give me but I definitely had it working withe the goldcrest command.

I could see from dnsleak and browser show the VPN was working correctly but when I tried running the qbittorrent it has never worked for me.

When I have the VPN off the qbittorrent and have the network interface set to "any" it works fine, but as soon as I turn on the VPN it will not work. Regardless of binding the network interface to "any" or "tun0" (the network I see goldcrest creates when it runs). I also tried different setting with the --network-lock.

I have the pi added as a device in the airvpn devices (made sure the VPN was off when I added it) and I have tired to set the port forward to the specific pi device and to "any device" and that has not changed anything.

I think it has to do with the port connection between the app and the VPN, since I tried using Deluge as the torrent client instead and the "test active port" button would show an issue only when the VPN was running, but I haven't figured out how to view more precise error logging. I also confirm that the "Test Port" in the airvpn port section on the website shows activity when I run the VPN on the pi even when any of the torrent clients is not on, so the port traffic seems to be getting from the airvpn servers to the pi but not from the goldcrest interface on the pi to the torrent clients.

Looking through goldcrest documentation I tried doing the --port, -R : Port override with the port i have forwarded but the VPN wouldn't work at all when I tried that so I don't know I am using that correctly or whatever else.

I will probably update this post with more information as I remember, I am just so tired of messing with this thing. I have spent many hours searching online with trial and error without success and am burning out at this point. If you think additional information would be helpful I can find it and post it.

At this point I might have to try setting up the torrent client in a docker container to see if that changes anything but I am running low on energy so I thought I would reach out for any assistance or suggestions anyone has. There is probably other stuff I have tried and will update this thread as I remember.

Much Appreciated.

Edited ... by refract-hurled
Additional info

[refract-hurled 0]

What ended up working for me was using the openvpn CLI. I went to https://airvpn.org/generator/ to create an .ovpn file and followed the instructions I found here https://askubuntu.com/questions/508250/openvpn-gui-client-for-udp-tcp that gave me this command:

sudo openvpn --config '/INSERT/PATH/HERE/generatefile.ovpn'

After doing so my port forwarding that i configured worked and qbittorent works as expected. I don't know why goldcrest did not work as expected but using this setup solved my problem.