VPN and port forwarding
VPN and port forwarding
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/969323
I am looking to buy a VPN subscription, and im interested in getting one that allows port forwarding. Found a few that still allows this, including pure VPN and air VPN which seem to offer good value for money, at least on the the long term plans. Any feedback on these two?
I used to have nordvpn, and used it for 3 years, and once that subscription ran out, have been using mullvad so far. Performance wise mullvad hasnt disappointed me or anything, but now im looking to find one that allows port forwarding.
I also have a doubt regarding the whole port forwarding thing, does the VPN having this feature enable to do it even if my ISP doesnt allow port forwarding? From the videos and articles I read, VPN port forwarding is just something you do inside their native apps and such, so if the ISP hasnt enabled port forwarding for me (which I know it hasnt, because tried to get jellyfin working the other day, and couldnt get the ports to open even after setting everything up in my router), will I still be able to do it? I tried searching around with this query, but didnt really find anything.
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I would go with Tailscale over ZeroTier though. Tailscale should perform better because it uses WireGuard as its protocol and WireGuard is extremely efficient.
No experience with Tailscale, but can confirm that performance-wise, WireGuard is a huge improvement over any other mainstream VPN protocol. It's also pretty robust and generally easier to use.
When configured and tuned properly, I've seen WireGuard able to move data at a little bit better than 90% of the provisioned bandwidth of the line. This in of itself is amazing and an order of magnitude better than OpenVPN or even IPSEC considering the overhead that encryption introduces into the packet size. Also, if you consider extra data processing going on, i.e. packets are being encapsulated, encrypted, transmitted, decrypted, and de-encapsulated, this is even more amazing.
Oh is that so, I didnt try tailscale yet. When I tried to figure out what to do with zerotier, not sure what I was planning to use it for then, it felt like I am in over my head a little bit. Is tailscale somewhat straightforward to set up/learn?
These two form a "mesh VPN" which use direct encrypted links between any number of devices. You can think of it as forming a virtual LAN where you can communicate with devices, including open ports. A lot of them have clever tricks to overcome CG-NATs, which you seem to be struggling with.
Another option is to just rent a server. You can get massive storage space for less than some VPNs cost and you don't need powerful hardware if your device supports the codecs you're using. You could even get a cheapy VPS and reverse proxy to your Jellyfin server through an SSH tunnel or similar. Lots of options here.
I would recommend hosting a wireguard server yourself instead of using tailscale or zerotier (both go through their own servers with your data, instead of your data remaining within your reach). Wireguard is really easy to deploy using docker using the wg-easy image.