107

Favourite FOSS Torrenting Client for Linux that has a VPN killswitch? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

40 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm a long-time Transmission user but I just learned that VPN killswitches are a thing (how did it take me so long!?). I would like to try another client which has this feature in case I forget to launch my VPN client before opening Transmission. Does anybody have any recommendations? Deluge? QBittorrent? Or any others?

UPDATE: Thanks for the suggestions everyone! I decided to give qbittorrent a try and have been enjoying it so far.

I followed these steps to bind it to my VPN from on Linux:

Pause torrents
Connect VPN
Open qBittorrent. Go to Preferences, and then Advanced tab
Change network interface to tun0. If unsure, disconnect VPN and restart qBittorrent then repeat step 1 to see which interface appears.
Restart qBittorrent
Test it out on the official kubuntu torrent or your favourite distro from LinuxTracker.org. Turn your VPN on and off while verifying whether it pauses and resumes downloading.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago

I disagree that it’s simpler, because most VPNs will use dynamic IPs. So any time your internet flickers or your power goes out, you’ll need to reconfigure Transmission with the new IP. Sure your method works for a kill switch. But it requires manual intervention every time it gets killed. With qBit’s interface binding, it doesn’t care what the VPN’s IP is. All it cares about is that it’s using the specific interface. So if the VPN is disconnected (and the VPN’s interface has no connection) then qBit simply thinks there’s no connection to the internet.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

you’ll need to reconfigure Transmission with the new IP. Sure your method works for a kill switch. But it requires manual intervention every time it gets killed.

It doesn't. You can specify your VPN provider range instead of a single IP and you won't need manual intervention.

If you go the systemd route you can do it even better with RestrictNetworkInterfaces:

RestrictNetworkInterfaces= Takes a list of space-separated network interface names. This option restricts the network interfaces that processes of this unit can use.

So I guess this is a better option than doing IP or IP range restrictions - zero manual intervention like you do in qBit. I'm so used to work with IPs instead of interfaces (because of the issues that can cause) that I even forgot about that option.