this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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If you're doing a P2P related activity over a VPN (or otherwise), port forwarding is very important for improving speed or enabling the service at all. That's because your router blocks incoming traffic from certain ports by default, ports that will be used with a P2P connection. To get around this, you can 'forward' a port that can be used for said P2P activity, letting your router know that the traffic you expect to see from a specific port should be let through.
You can simply leave port forwarding to your personal router, but if you want to stay anonymous while participating in P2P connections, then you'll want to use a VPN service. If a VPN service doesn't utilize port forwarding, then any P2P connections you use will either be straight up impossible, or very slow. For example, you wanted to host a gaming server without giving away your actual IP address, then a VPN with port forwarding is desirable. The same can be said for torrenting.
I appreciate the breakdown, but I meant i was ignorant on why port forwarding was important for a VPN :) Was still a great write up that should be used as reference for others! :D
I didnt realize you still had to port forward to get around ISP traffick shaping/blockage with a VPN. Thought the encrypted tunnel between you and the VPN disguised that, and any port stuff was done at their end, after exiting the tunnel.
VPNS with port forwarding matter if you want to stay anonymous while using P2P services.
@Helldiver_M @Dubious_Fart @leraje actually the port forwarding thing is about accepting inbound connections. Without port forwarding, NAT routers (including VPNs) randomly allocate ports for outbound connections but still won't accept inbound connections on those same ports.
There's a trick where you discover the randomly allocated port numbers and then both connect to each other at the same time so both routers think it's outbound. It works unreliably and BitTorrent doesn't use it.
Why doesn't the new UDP torrent protocol use STUN or any of the server- or peer-assisted ways of punching a UDP hole between two NAT-ed endpoints?
Jeez is this why my torrents slowed down to a crawl lately? I'm on Mullvad and wasn't aware they removed port forwarding, or even really what port forwarding is until now.