Remote access and VPN

Windows specific questions, problems.
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aohw

Remote access and VPN

Post by aohw »

Hello,
I have a question level remote access of qBitTorrent. I have an active VPN and I can not even access another local pc on the WEBui.

Can you tell me if there is a solution to help pass the remote off?

Windows 10

Have a good day.
laz305

Re: Remote access and VPN

Post by laz305 »

I too also need help connecting my VPN to qBittorrent. Without my VPN connected torrent establishes a connection. But once I turn on my VPN torrent disconnects.
abvmoose

Re: Remote access and VPN

Post by abvmoose »

[quote="aohw"]
Hello,
I have a question level remote access of qBitTorrent. I have an active VPN and I can not even access another local pc on the WEBui.

Can you tell me if there is a solution to help pass the remote off?

Windows 10

Have a good day.
[/quote]

[quote="laz305"]
I too also need help connecting my VPN to qBittorrent. Without my VPN connected torrent establishes a connection. But once I turn on my VPN torrent disconnects.
[/quote]


Hi,

I also had tons of issues getting WebUI to work through a VPN in Windows 10 but I finally got it to work.
Im running Win 10, my VPN client is an app in Windows and im using Windows Defender Firewall and Hardware fw in DD-Wrt running on a Linksys Wrt acm 3200.

I think you need to verify if the port youre using with the web-ui is reachable through your VPN connection. There are lots of sites and tools for that.
It didnt work for me allthough I know I had configured portforwarding correctly in DD-WRT so it was very confusing.

What I think is happening in a lot of cases is that the VPN provider is blocking the port youre trying to use, acting like a second or third firewall.
So first check without any soft fw, then with soft fw and your router fw and then with all with all three using your VPN. If your port is reachable then it should work.

Some Vpn providers block a lot of ports and just because you might have a port exposed to the internet, the same port might not be open from the vpn Provider so you
might have to check with them which ports they have open. Some charge extra for opening ports. I was lucky that my provider gives me 5 random port for free to use.
So I only had to forward my local port for the web-UI to the random port I was given by the VPN provider.

It was unfortunatley not enough to get it to work and what I think was going on is something was faulty with the "bridged mode" I was using.
Something in the port forwarding wasn't working right but this guide solved that for me:
https://mullvad.net/en/guides/plex-mullvad

In case you would need any pointers on setting up encrypted access to UI I used the these guides to get it to work for me:
For creating a self signed certificate in Windows: https://www.howtogeek.com/107415/it-how ... -machines/

For converting the PFX file to a compatible CRT file I used this:
https://www.itsupportmiami.com/how-to-c ... -crt-file/

Then off course import the crt and key file in the desktop UI of qBitTorrent to set it up.

Even though I did all this it still didn't work 100% of the time I can't recall exactly what is was now but im very glad to say that it was resolved
with the latest update that came out now on August 24. Your first post was then so maybe you hadn't gotten around to update the client yet but there seems to have been
alot of work done with the WEBUI according to the changelog so I would strongly, suggest you update the client and try again.

Also if I might give a suggestion to try out dynamic DNS. I tried the free one you can get from duckdns org and it works perfectly.
So now I connect through 3 firewalls with secured access and different ip everytime to the same domain name.
I just struggled with this for for so long I just had to share it, hope it will help you out with this. Cheers
Switeck

Re: Remote access and VPN

Post by Switeck »

[quote="abvmoose"]Im running Win 10, my VPN client is an app in Windows and im using Windows Defender Firewall and Hardware fw in DD-Wrt running on a Linksys Wrt acm 3200.

I think you need to verify if the port youre using with the web-ui is reachable through your VPN connection. There are lots of sites and tools for that.
It didnt work for me allthough I know I had configured portforwarding correctly in DD-WRT so it was very confusing.

What I think is happening in a lot of cases is that the VPN provider is blocking the port youre trying to use, acting like a second or third firewall.[/quote]I'm pretty sure that port forwarding your local router (that's running DD-WRT) would only help if the remote Web-ui is trying to connect through your regular IPv4 ip address and NOT using the VPN's ip address.

This is assuming your VPN connection goes through a VPN server outside your LAN.
Things can be way more confusing if you've got a VPN server of your own -- with multiple starting points and end points both inside and outside your DD-WRT router's LAN.
abvmoose

Re: Remote access and VPN

Post by abvmoose »

[quote="Switeck"]
[quote="abvmoose"]Im running Win 10, my VPN client is an app in Windows and im using Windows Defender Firewall and Hardware fw in DD-Wrt running on a Linksys Wrt acm 3200.

I think you need to verify if the port youre using with the web-ui is reachable through your VPN connection. There are lots of sites and tools for that.
It didnt work for me allthough I know I had configured portforwarding correctly in DD-WRT so it was very confusing.

What I think is happening in a lot of cases is that the VPN provider is blocking the port youre trying to use, acting like a second or third firewall.[/quote]I'm pretty sure that port forwarding your local router (that's running DD-WRT) would only help if the remote Web-ui is trying to connect through your regular IPv4 ip address and NOT using the VPN's ip address.

This is assuming your VPN connection goes through a VPN server outside your LAN.
Things can be way more confusing if you've got a VPN server of your own -- with multiple starting points and end points both inside and outside your DD-WRT router's LAN.
[/quote]

Yes that's sounds like quite an ordeal. At some point I want to set up my own vpn server as well but Im not there yet. Im planning on starting run the vpn client on the router instead of on the pc, maybe that will generate new problems. It's possible Ive missed something but do you mean I only need to open the port that the VPN server is using? How will the packets know where to go from the vpn port to the web ui port if I don't use port forwarding?
Switeck

Re: Remote access and VPN

Post by Switeck »

[quote="abvmoose"]Yes that's sounds like quite an ordeal. At some point I want to set up my own vpn server as well but Im not there yet. Im planning on starting run the vpn client on the router instead of on the pc, maybe that will generate new problems. It's possible Ive missed something but do you mean I only need to open the port that the VPN server is using? How will the packets know where to go from the vpn port to the web ui port if I don't use port forwarding?[/quote]You don't need to port forward to access websites. VPNs are essentially web servers/websites in the same way -- you have a connection TO them and they route packets to you. Port forwarding is only needed for incoming connections.

More is mentioned here:    https://qbforums.shiki.hu/index.php/topic,5085.0.html
abvmoose

Re: Remote access and VPN

Post by abvmoose »

[quote="Switeck"]
[quote="abvmoose"]Yes that's sounds like quite an ordeal. At some point I want to set up my own vpn server as well but Im not there yet. Im planning on starting run the vpn client on the router instead of on the pc, maybe that will generate new problems. It's possible Ive missed something but do you mean I only need to open the port that the VPN server is using? How will the packets know where to go from the vpn port to the web ui port if I don't use port forwarding?[/quote]You don't need to port forward to access websites. VPNs are essentially web servers/websites in the same way -- you have a connection TO them and they route packets to you. Port forwarding is only needed for incoming connections.

More is mentioned here:    https://qbforums.shiki.hu/index.php/topic,5085.0.html
[/quote]

Yes, off course you're right! My bad.  :-[

Do you know if Portforwarding on the router would be needed if I ran the VPN client directly on the router itself, or would you need to configure some sort of bridge at that point?
Switeck

Re: Remote access and VPN

Post by Switeck »

If the VPN client on the router still connects to a remote VPN server, the router still wouldn't need to be port-forwarded.

You might need to configure some sort of bridge (rules?) on the router though to get that to work.
VPNs can't be very CPU intensive, and routers tend to have terribly weak CPUs in them, so only try router VPN client as an experiment.
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