IMPORTANT UPDATE 2025-04-03 - PARTS THAT ARE NO MORE VALID APPEAR WITH STRIKE THROUGH CHARACTERS
Hello!
We're very glad to announce a remarkable expansion of our inbound remote port forwarding system aimed at avoiding once and for all the port exhaustion problem.
The comfort and the growth problem
In the AirVPN "Port Forwarding" service, unlike some of our competitors we grant that assigned ports are not server specific. We also ensure that they remain permanently reserved to an account for as long as any valid plan is active. This unique system offers unparalleled comfort as you don't have to worry about server switches, zone selections and program re-configurations. However, ports are only 65536, because the space reserved for them in a TCP/IP packet header is 2 bytes, and the inconvenience of the great comfort brought by the AirVPN service is that the port exhaustion is nearing as more and more users decide to use the service.
A "no compromise" solution
Our goal was to avoid port exhaustion while maintaining maximum comfort. We are introducing a new system specifically designed to achieve this goal.
Each user is assigned a specific exit IP address and therefore can access a specific port pool. While a pool nears exhaustion, new registering users are assigned to a new pool. With this method, port exhaustion is postponed indefinitely while the comfort of the service is preserved. A user never bounces back and forth different addresses and does not need to discern pools. The port panel will always show the correct IP address your node is reachable on. Furthermore DDNS will also resolve into the correct address as usual.
NOTE: if you are a user who used the previous system with pool 1 and pool 2 ports, and you have a mixture of pool 1 and pool 2 ports, your setup does not change at the moment. However, as time passes by, you will have the option to bring back all of your ports to the same pool, therefore you will not have to worry anymore about different pools and specific, p2p-suitable pools.
How it works
Each Air VPN server sends out clients' VPN traffic through a shared exit IP address.
From now on, AirVPN servers feature multiple exit IP addresses, each of which is linked to a user. Therefore we can determine which pool a port/address is associated with and route traffic accordingly.
The implications for AirVPN users and customers
The obvious good impact is that port availability increases dramatically. The implementation is truly scalable: the infrastructure may add just one address per VPN server to have an entirely new pool of (65536-2048) ports with no impact at all to users who had previously picked to forward ports remotely. Each user can rely indefinitely, as long as the account has a valid plan, on the same ports and the same exit-IP address.
Kind regards & datalove
AirVPN Staff