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…

  • ThetaDev@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    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.comEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.mlEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        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.mlEnglish
          2·
          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.comEnglish
          1·
          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.