CowardVenus15

This is the state of my Vanagon project after about five moths of work in my free time. Upholstery by my wife!

First off, you may be wondering “Do I even need to port forward?” This question really boils down to wether or not you want to be able to seed. You may want to join some private trackers that require you to maintain an upload ratio or you may just want to torrent sustainably and give back what you take, both require port forwarding. If you’re already shopping for a VPN to protect yourself while you torrent, you might as well go for one that includes this feature.

What difference does port forwarding make to seeding? Without having a port for peers to see you on, you are not connectable. If you’re not connectable, you cannot seed. From the TorrentLeech wiki:

When you start a torrent, your client sends a notification to the tracker that you are opting to be a peer for this torrent. Your client also tells the tracker what Port number your torrent client is configured to listen on. This process is known as an “Announce”. >

AirVPN is an excellent choice for torrenting as BitTorrent is explicitly allowed by their ToS and each account is allowed 20 ports to forward.

To get set up, first purchase some time on AirVPN’s website. Once your account has been activated, you will need to download the required software to have your computer connect to the VPN. For me using a headless Linux server, I went with wireguard, but feel free to download AirVPNs app for Windows or any other way you want to connect. For my instance, on AirVPN’s website I clicked the “Client Area” tab and then “Config Generator” to create the wireguard conf file.

Once you are able to connect to the VPN, we can set up port forwarding. On AirVPN’s website, click “Client Area” then in the “Ports” box hit the “Manage” button. When on the port manager page, click “Request New Port”. This will give you a port number that isn’t already taken. Now that we have our port number, we can hop back over to qBittorrent. Open the qBittorrent settings and click the “Connection” tab. In the “Listening Port” section there is a box where we can type in our port number. Type the number given to you by AirVPN and hit “save” at the bottom. Now you just have to restart qBittorrent for the change to take effect.

We can now test that port forwarding is set up correctly by returning to the “Ports” section of “Client Area” on the AirVPN website. Under your port that you opened earlier, hit the “Test Open” button. If AirVPN can see qBittorrent as a running service, a message saying “Open!” will appear confirming that qBittorrent is configured correctly to use port forwarding.

Now you are free to enjoy torrenting knowing that you are continuing to the community every time you download.

One thing I’ve noticed in my initial Lemmy experience is that there can be many duplicate communities across servers. I’d like to be able to quickly see in the search bar which communities have the most subscribers