Download doesn't start with VPN on (but progresses when turned back on)

VPN
1

Recently, most torrents won’t start downloading unless I turn off the VPN for a moment. A small minority of torrents don’t have this issue though. And once downloading starts, I can turn the VPN back on, and downloading can finish.

I’m pretty sure I don’t want that moment of downloading without the VPN, but how bad is it?

What could be the issue? Some sort of initial metadata lookup?

I use TunnelBear VPN if that matters.

2

So what you are doing is actually bypassing the VPN for the entire download.

A VPN is a second path that your computer can use to send/receive data. But for the data to go down that path, the connection needs to be established with that path in the beginning. The data will travel on whatever path the initial connection is established on.

So when you disable your VPN, you are allowing the connection to establish using the non-VPN path. So all data transmitted/received after that connection is made travels over the non-VPN path.

So the real question is why is TunnelBear not working with qBittorrent. And he answer is because TunnelBear is garbage for torrenting. You need to find a VPN that supports port forwarding. Otherwise it will be much harder for qBittorrent to establish a connection to peers/seeders.

3

Do you have qBittorrent > Settings > Advanced > Network Interface set to anything other than Any Interface?

It should be set to your VPN Interface. It may be set to your local Ethernet or Wifi Interface.

4

Well shit. What VPN would you recommend?

5

I found some troubleshooting steps that involved pointing that seeing to the NordVPN interface (for NordVPN users, obv), but when I checked that setting, and there didn’t seem to be a TumnelBear interface option.

So yeah, it’s set to Any Interface

6

Thanks for this - I have Mullvad, and set Network Interface to Mullvad, and nothing would start. Setting it to Any interface allowed it to work with Mullvad again.

7

i have it as any interface but still it doesn’t works

8

I use Astrill, it’s always been great for me. As long as you enable the port forwarding option and connect to a P2P friendly 10Gb server. I can get 1Gbps torrent downloads with that setup.