I wanted to do some soulseek, but just as I began moving towards that this happened. What VPN should I use for this ? I don't want to use any of those over advertised shady VPNs like nordvpn (who was a spamming machine on my PC back when I used it) or surfshark or others if not necessary...

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[–] ancoraunamoka@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

honestly you are going to be fine with most VPN providers. Unless you are one of the members of the very big scene groups, you are just seeding and your threat model is just to mask your connections from your ISP.

I personally suggest to use njalla. Few people talk about it but it's a very very good provider, better than mullvad imho. Allows port forwarding, is transparent about legal requests and have a history of support with the piratebay. On top of that paypal denied payments to them for a period, and that is usually a good sign

[–] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I personally suggest to use njalla. Few people talk about it but it’s a very very good provider, better than mullvad imho. Allows port forwarding

That's interesting, their website barely mentions any features about the VPN so I had assumed they don't offer port forward. Just curious

How many port forwards do they offer?
Is it a static or dynamic port forward number? e.g. do they automatically change the number on you after x amount of time or does the port number stay the same?
How do you configure the port forward on their system? Can it be configured on their website? Or must it be done via a VPN application they offer, or some other way?

[–] ThetaDev@lemmy.fmhy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Since my airvpn test month expired, I've just bought a Njalla subscription. Here are my experiences:

Pro:

Payment via PayPal or cryptocurrency
Same price as Mullvad (5€/month)
Static IPv4 and v6, allows you to forward any port
Torrenting just worked (including port forwarding)
No VPN application, just use vanilla OpenVPN or Wireguard
Does not throttle my internet speed (I only have 50MBit/s, so I cannot really test VPN performance. Definitely better than AirVPN though)

Contra:

Requires E-Mail address/XMPP to create an account
Only one client. If you need to access your VPN from multiple devices at the same time, you need to buy multiple subscriptions
Only Swedish servers

Conclusion: for my usecase (Raspberry-Pi-based torrent box) Njalla looks great. If you want to use it on multiple devices or need to circumvent geoblocks, you should look for a different service.

[–] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the info! If you just use vanilla OpenVPN/Wireguard with it then I'm guessing the port forwarding is something configured on the Njalla website, correct? That would be good news if true & opens up the possibility of setting it up on a router with port forward.

[–] ThetaDev@lemmy.fmhy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You do not need to set up port forwarding on the website. They give each customer a static IP, so as long as you configure your ip tables to allow port forwarding, it just works on any port. QBittorrent worked out of the box.

[–] ThetaDev@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Here is the VPN setup page of Njalla. As you can see, it looks just as spartan as the public-facing parts of their website.

Njalla Interface

[–] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Gotcha, that makes sense now. Some VPN services do sell a dedicated IP in which case yes you can basically open as many ports as you like since they are all forwarded. That's great to hear, they'll definitely be on my VPN list next time I'm looking around for one.