Does anyone know how to run qbittorrent and protonvpn in a VM? When I try to run the qbittorrent setup app I get this message (image below) and I don't see anything mentioning a VM in the qbittorrent [dot] org forum.
I am new to torrenting, so I don't really know what to do. I figured/assumed that torrenting/seeding in a VM might be safer as it is another layer deep, and that it may help keep traffic separate (inside the VM: I'd be using a vpn and torrenting, and outside the VM: I'd not be using a vpn and just regular internet surfing). Is this possible?
Thank you.
Regardless of where you decide to run your VPN (normal system, VM, or container), just don't forget to turn killswitch on in the VPN settings. ProtonVPN is very good at this. They have killswitch built-in in all their client apps. And it's quite a tricky thing to configure manually.
Kill switches aren't as reliable, binding your VPN to your torrent client is the only sure fire way to ensure you don't leak traffic through your home IP.
Why? Killswitch is by definition a mechanism to not leak traffic outside VPN. This is exactly the purpose it's designed for. It is binding all traffic to VPN connection on system level. That is what it does under the hood, at least in ProtonVPN. It's using iptables or firewalld or whatever else is present in the system. Even when your VPN client app isn't running, killswitch is still there (and you can't access internet until you connect to the VPN).
I'm not the only person who thinks Kill switches don't live up to their name
These are what I could find in the last 15 minutes, hopefully this is enough.
Any idea if gluetun does this by default? A popular setup is setting the network mode on the application docker to the gluetun service and then gluetun itself says it has a killswitch built in. I assume they did that well since its very popular and this is pretty much the main purpose of the container.
Okay, I see. So killswitch implementation might be non-perfect, depending on VPN. And there are reports of Surfshark leaking IP when torrenting under killswitch. I guess they might not have "permanent killswitch" option like ProtonVPN and this is why it happened. So basically if torrent app launches before VPN or VPN closes before torrent app killswitch might get turned off together with VPN app and some traffic might leak. This is impossible under "permanent killswitch". So to rely on killswitch I guess the first thing to check is if internet is accessible after closing VPN client app. If not, then it's a good killswitch. But with qBittorrent it's always a good idea to use that setting for extra safety. It might not be present in most other torrent apps though, and to do the same manually using iptables or whatever might be tricky and error-prone.
I just tie qbittorrent to the VPN virtual adapter, so even if Proton disconnects the traffic stops rather than moving over to my WAN IP.
Got an explanation for how to do this?
Preferences -> Advanced -> Network Interface
Then select the VPN connection. That's what I do for qbittorrent. Not sure about other programs.
My VPN connection appears to change whenever I connect, because it's connecting to the quickest server, so I am not able to use the same settings in qbittorrent. How do you manage server shifts like that?
The interface name changes each time? Mine looks like "TUN0" regardless of what VPN server i connect.to. you could try using a wireguard configuration set to a specific server if yours is changing each time.
Thank you. Do you mean even with ProtonVPN it is hard to configure?
ProtonVPN makes it super easy - just a checkbox in options. But if you were to set up VPN yourself manually using OpenVPN configs for example, it's very hard and error-prone. For me this is probably the most valuable thing in ProtonVPN client apps.