ANSWERED Am I understanding your port forwarding correctly?

[The Fox 0]

I've just moved from another VPN service because I'm sick of their servers going AWOL. One thing they did OK at though was port forwarding. It was configured a little different (choose a server IP address & choose a port... if available I got it) to how it's done here. Am I correct in the following understanding:

1.  When I reserve ports, they are available to me from any VPN server's exit IP address that I connect my VPN client to? Not sure how you work that magic if it's correct but it makes life very easy.

For example: if I connect to Kornephorus, and have port 10001 forwarded to me, then disconnect and reconnect to Capricornus, port 10001 at Capricornus' exit-IP now comes to me with no config changes required?

2. Again with port 10001 forwarded and set to "all devices"... If I have two client devices (on the same LAN so same public IP address from here) connected to different VPN servers, Say Client A connected to Kornephorus and Client B to Capricornus:  Client A will receive traffic forwarded from Kornephorus's port 10001 and Client B will receive traffic forwarded from Capricornus' 10001?

3. If I want to connect multiple clients to the same VPN server, with multiple forwarded ports, then I either leave the port forwarding on "all devices" and let my client devices choose what to listen to, or I could opt to pass only a particular port to a particular device by selecting that in the port forwarding for each forwarded port? (the first option would not be so good I guess if there's a lot of incoming traffic, since it would be flooded to all devices on the VPN whether they listen to that port or not).


I'm asking to confirm the above because it seems too good to be true. I've done a bit of reading of past posts here though and it does seem to be correct.

[Staff 10502]

9 hours ago, The Fox said:

1.  When I reserve ports, they are available to me from any VPN server's exit IP address that I connect my VPN client to? Not sure how you work that magic if it's correct but it makes life very easy.

Hello!

Welcome aboard. 

1. Yes, correct.
 

9 hours ago, The Fox said:

2. Again with port 10001 forwarded and set to "all devices"... If I have two client devices (on the same LAN so same public IP address from here) connected to different VPN servers, Say Client A connected to Kornephorus and Client B to Capricornus:  Client A will receive traffic forwarded from Kornephorus's port 10001 and Client B will receive traffic forwarded from Capricornus' 10001?

2. Yes, correct.
 

9 hours ago, The Fox said:

3. If I want to connect multiple clients to the same VPN server, with multiple forwarded ports, then I either leave the port forwarding on "all devices" and let my client devices choose what to listen to, or I could opt to pass only a particular port to a particular device by selecting that in the port forwarding for each forwarded port? (the first option would not be so good I guess if there's a lot of incoming traffic, since it would be flooded to all devices on the VPN whether they listen to that port or not).

3. With a port linked to "All devices" this is not possible, because you create an unsupported case in forwarding rules, i.e. the same packet to a specific VPN server public IP address port should be forwarded to the port of multiple VPN IP addresses. This is not implemented and also poses a technical challenge in our infrastructure that's not trivial. To overcome this situation you must use unique key pair for each device and take care to link each port to a single device. Alternatively, a simpler solution is just connecting each device to a different VPN server (your 2nd scenario).

Kind regards