Recommend Your BitTorrent VPN Tunneling Provider

runswithascript · 02-05-2008 6:15pm #1

I'm trying to circumvent Irishband's throttling of my BitTorrent protocol usage. I have changed the ports and enabled encryption etc so SSH/VPN tunneling is my only option.

I heard alot of great things about Relakks but they have payment issues at the moment so I can't activate my account. I've emailed them and while I await a response I may as well shop around. Google will show me other providers but it will not tell me about an Irish user's account of the QoS.

Are you tunneling your BitTorrent usage? Has it got past your ISP's throttling? Would you recommend your provider? If so I would like to hear from you.

N.B. - I do not want to hear from people claiming Irish Broadband aren't throttling any/all users and there's another thread already open where you can do that. I'm the user, I know what's happening.

PogMoThoin · 02-05-2008 8:20pm

LA3G wrote: »

I'm trying to circumvent my Irishband's throttling of my BitTorrent protocol usage.

daveyjoe · 02-05-2008 8:59pm

For getting past the pesky port blocking firewall at college, I set up a SOCKS proxy on a VPS account that I have. So all my traffic passes through SSH.

You can set it up by using a command like 'ssh -D 8085 user@123.123.123.123', where 8085 is the port which you wish to tunnel your data through. You can then use an application level proxy which routes requests through localhost:8085.

Might be a bit expensive if all you want to use it for is tunnelling. Google services like Linode or Slicehost, packages start at ~$20.

daveyjoe · 02-05-2008 9:05pm

Also, speed is excellent always maxes out the college connection, I've seen downloads at over 3MB/s. Megabytes not Megabits.

runswithascript · 03-05-2008 6:17pm

In your experience then you think SSH tunneling trumps VPN tunneling? Have you tried both? I had read to the contrary. Someone in #linode had been telling me that I shouldn't use their service for gaming because of the lag but it's okay to OpenVPN everything else through them including BitTorrent. Is there a way I could route BitTorrent through the provider and simultaneously gaming direct through my ISP?

daveyjoe · 03-05-2008 6:48pm

LA3G wrote: »

In your experience then you think SSH tunneling trumps VPN tunneling? Have you tried both? I had read to the contrary. Someone in #linode had been telling me that I shouldn't use their service for gaming because of the lag but it's okay to OpenVPN everything else through them including BitTorrent. Is there a way I could route BitTorrent through the provider and simultaneously gaming direct through my ISP?

Never used VPN tunnelling so I couldn't say. Tunnelling through SSH works fine for me, it's very easy to set up and it just works. OpenVPN would be a more fully featured solution, personally it would be overkill for me.

You should probably use a European service if you're using it for gaming. There is no problem with tunnelling certain apps and not others. Just use a direct connection to the internet if you want to go directly through the ISP and set up the proxy for other applications. If the proxy is at the application level then you should be able to set up rules for which apps are tunnelled and which are not.

Edit:

By the way, I use Linode because I have an account with them anyway for other reasons. If you have no other use for the service than tunnelling then I'm sure that there are more cost-effective solutions out there.

runswithascript · 04-05-2008 3:28pm

I'm going to go with this ~€25 UK package which was recommended by someone who has used the company previously for BitTorrent unless I can find something better. I've only really been looking in Ireland but if the search result trend continues as it is I will start to look in the UK. I'd really like to have the VPS in Ireland but from what I've found on Google so far everything is much more expensive here and nothing within my budget even comes close to touching 100mbps bandwidth and 250gbs of storage which I will need for seeding on private trackers.

Can I operate under assumption that providers won't have the BitTorrent protocol firewalled? I don't want to sign up and find out afterwards I can't use the VPS as I intended but at the same time I don't want to overtly ask each provider if they allow filesharing. I was on the phone to a well known Irish provider during the week and I asked the technician if they blocked any protocols. He asked me to be more specific and then he came back to me with a reply from an engineer saying their firewall would block BitTorrent automatically. I'm left wondering if I was just being told that only because I asked and that in fact they don't block anything at all.

I'd like to initially start by configuring the VPS to download and seed on site with a 95% download/upload cap and then use the remaining 5mbps on my 3mbps line for good measure for SSH and eventually VPN tunneling. This way none of the bandwidth is wasted

daveyjoe · 04-05-2008 7:23pm

LA3G wrote: »

I'm going to go with this ~€25 UK package which was recommended by someone who has used the company previously for BitTorrent unless I can find something better. I've only really been looking in Ireland but if the search result trend continues as it is I will start to look in the UK. I'd really like to have the VPS in Ireland but from what I've found on Google so far everything is much more expensive here and nothing within my budget even comes close to touching 100mbps bandwidth and 250gbs of storage which I will need for seeding on private trackers.

Can I operate under assumption that providers won't have the BitTorrent protocol firewalled? I don't want to sign up and find out afterwards I can't use the VPS as I intended but at the same time I don't want to overtly ask each provider if they allow filesharing. I was on the phone to a well known Irish provider during the week and I asked the technician if they blocked any protocols. He asked me to be more specific and then he came back to me with a reply from an engineer saying their firewall would block BitTorrent automatically. I'm left wondering if I was just being told that only because I asked and that in fact they don't block anything at all.

I'd like to initially start by configuring the VPS to download and seed on site with a 95% download/upload cap and then use the remaining 5mbps on my 3mbps line for good measure for SSH and eventually VPN tunneling. This way none of the bandwidth is wasted

That's a dedicated server not a VPS, price seems very good though.
Look at rTorrent if you're seeding from the server.

I'd love to know what Irish VPS that was? My guess is that they would probably would say no but ignore it unless you were abusing the service.