austins.club

What is Dynamic DNS?
"Dynamic DNS or DDNS is a method of updating, in real time, a Domain Name System (DNS) to point to a changing IP address on the Internet. This is used to provide a persistent domain name for a resource that may change location on the network."
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_DNS
 
Premium Members can choose up to 20 names in their Forwarded Ports page, accessible from the left tabs of their "Client Area".
 
Just for comfort, a name is associated to a forwarded port.

When a Premium member connects to an Air VPN server, the .airdns.org DNS record is updated to the exit-IP address of that server. Therefore, be aware that this service may be unusable when you establish multiple connections to different servers from different devices with the same account (in such cases, you need to point directly to the exit-IP address of the server, or use some third-party DDNS which you manually set).

This service can be useful when you need a domain name, which must be persistent across all Air VPN servers, for a service you need to run "behind Air VPN". For example: if you want to host a game server, you can communicate to the players the DNS name and freely switch Air VPN servers.

Notes:TTL (Time-To-Live) is one hour. If you change VPN server, one hour may be needed before other users can resolve correctly your domain name. A longer time might be necessary: some public DNS (for example Google DNS) sometimes ignore TTL in their caching system.DNS are created or updated when a connection to an Air server is performed. They are deleted only if you disable the system (i.e. you delete the name from the forwarded ports panel). The latest IP address is NOT removed during disconnection or connection retry.

I found your description of your problem bit confusing. But if your VPS is remote from you (not e.g. on VirtualBox on your PC) you will inevitably have the issue addressed here:

https://airvpn.org/topic/12274-ubuntu-vm-cant-connect-through-openvpn/?p=44812

If you think this your problem, try the quick and dirty approach in the UPDATE part first.

The problem is that default gateway gets changed by OpenVPN, and that breaks your current SSH connection unless you set up appropriate routes before you start OpenVPN.

I'm not attempting to wrap my entire connection. Just to use PuTTY as a proxy for a browser that goes through a VPS which will go through AirVPN.

In that case, same procedure applies as it would be for a Linux machine. There are no special requirements, except
maybe a forwarded port in order to maintain a VNC connection to it.

But they will have "root" access on their VPS, which is where they now need it. They no longer need it on the PC where they are sitting.
 
  I don't think they expect anyone to modify OpenVPN. They want AirVPN to provide SOCKS servers or SSH servers that will allow the SSH client to do SOCKS, so that they don't have to set up a VPS to do it for themselves.
 
AirVPN have been very clear in the past that they are not going to do that.

Again, this is not something you can "fix" or add as a feature - it is an OS limitation, and a fair one.
This is why I don't quite understand what benefit a VPS would provide - you will still be limited in a way
which you cannot change your current routing table. This is not because of the Air client.

The admin rights are required for setting alternative default route, not for the SSH connection.
This is how operating systems work, it's not "AirVPN plans" or anything related.
 
The solution with a VPS will have the same limitation. You cannot wrap all traffic in a tunnel
without admin rights, so this will not solve anything on limited permissions accounts.

I think he means PC-s where one cannot get onto an "Administrator" account. You cannot start OpenVPN (i.e. configure the TAP interface or the routing table) on Windows without this. Tunneling over SSH does not remove this necessity.
 
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I should have emphasized in my first post that the VPS in Europe still needs to use AirVPN because I can no longer find a VPS provider whose UK IP addresses are not blocked by BBC. Having the VPS be in Europe is just to avoid poor peering. I have tried using a VPS in North America through AirVPN (OVH) and had results not much better than I get at home.

You have SSH tunnel option with Air as well, unlike the majority of other VPN services which don't. You don't need any additional VPS.

What is the difference between TCP and UDP ports? Which port should I choose?

UDP is a connectionless protocol, so during the handshake it is not always possible to do an effective error correction. As a result, when there's high ping or low quality line during the OpenVPN login, the handshake may fail, although you could see no significant problem after (if) the connection is established. TCP is capable of handling these problems.

On the other hand, UDP is more efficient once the connection is established.

If you experience problems with VoIP video/audio conversations when connected to the VPN through a TCP port, a typical case for which a difference may be visible (VoIP over TCP - for example UDP over TCP -  is clearly inferior to VoIP over UDP because TCP implements ARQ, UDP does not), then go for an UDP connection.

In general, you should always try an UDP connection if your ISP allows it and you don't experience any problem during the handshake.

A particular case is a connection over TOR or over an http-proxy. In this case, TCP is mandatory.

Variety of ports (53, 80, 443) is an additional option to try to bypass country or ISPs blocks, or bandwidth management.