Search the Community

Hi, I have written an alternative client for AirVPN that I would like to share with you. Just as Eddie, it supports other providers, too, as long as OpenVPN config files are provided. For AirVPN and Mullvad it offers a convenient update function that just requires you to enter your credentials in order to download the latest server configurations. Furthermore, it allows you to choose among the plethora of protocols offered by AirVPN (including OpenVPN over SSL/SSH) except the experimental ones (I might add support for those in the future, once they become available for all servers). Qomui (Qt OpenVPN management UI) as I have named it, is written in Python and PyQt and should run on any GNU/Linux distribution. It allows you to easily create double-hop connections. In other words, you can route your requests via two OpenVPN servers. This feature works provider-independent. For example, you could choose a Mullvad server for the first hop, and AirVPN for the second (I have successfully tested this with AirVPN, Mullvad and ProtonVPN). Thereby, it avoids a major downside of similar offers by some providers, namely the fact that if one provider controls all "hops" he or she could potentially still see, log or inspect all your traffic. In the latter case, you would gain little in terms of privacy. With the ability to "mix" providers, Qomui does not suffer from the same problem and hence offers some tangible benefits. Obviously, you would still have to sacrifice some speed/bandwith, though. Depending on your DE (looking at you, Gnome!), Qomui will also display a systray icon that shows the country of the server you are currently connected to. Additional features include protection against DNS leaks and a firewall that optionally blocks all outgoing network connections except for the OpenVPN server you have chosen. Since it is never recommended to run graphical applications as root, which is a major flaw of most OpenVPN clients, all commands that require root privileges are handled by a background service that can be controlled via systemd. The following screenshot gives you an idea of what Qomui looks like (on Arch/Arc Dark Theme). If you are interested, you can download Qomui from github: https://github.com/corrad1nho/qomui Of course, I'd be happy for any kind of feedback. If you find bugs or Qomui does not run properly or not at all on your machine, please let me know. I'm happy to help! At last, a big thank you to AirVPN and its amazing community. The fact that you rely more on explaining technical details than empty promises, has helped me to learn a lot. It is also one of the main reason why I chose AirVPN. Commendably, Eddie is also released as open-source software. Only Mullvad does that, too, to my knowledge. Why doesn't every provider do that? You are selling a service, not software! Why would I trust in proprietary software? Funnily, I have never really used Eddie, though, since I was accustomed to manually adding config files to NetworkManager as my first provider did not offer a GNU/Linux client. My interest in features such as OpenVPN over SSL made me look into more convenient solutions, though. Ultimately I decided to write my own program as I wanted to learn some Python and this provided a perfect practical challenge. I have actually used Qomui daily on multiple machines during the past few months and constantly tried to improve it. So I'd thought it'd be about to time to share it (it's an alpha release, though). Have a nice weekend! Corrado

Hi, I've looked, and found one or two bits on geolocation and also found info saying airvpn already provides doublehop ... but here's my question, obviously I'm not tech savvy enuf to get it even tho I've probably read the answer already (ok it's two questions) in order to defeat geolocation do I need to doublehop? if I need to doublehop do I do that by simply making two connections simultaneously? Or is it something else entirely? Or is each single connection actually already doublehopping thru more than one server? thanks Knopf