Good news and "bad" news.
Good news is I got port-forwarding via AzireVPN to work with qBittorrent in a TrueNAS Core jail.
I created a custom script, since the official Azire support for this feature is in its infancy, which they even admitted to me over a customer support email.
For the record, I really dislike the command-line, and I hate scripting. (Spoiler alert: I suck at it.) But I did this out of frustration and created a fairly intuitive script to manage port-forwarding when there is a lack of a GUI and web browser. (Why is "sh" so convoluted when it comes to variables within "curl" arguments? I want to stuff the
quotation and
double-quote symbols into a fire pit!)
If this sounds strange, it's because you cannot configure or manage forwarded ports on the AzireVPN dashboard
unless you are actively connected via the tunnel while using your web browser. (This rules out a FreeBSD jail outright, so you have to resort to API calls via "curl".) So unlike Mullvad, this feels archaic.
But alas, I created a custom script based on their examples, and I've got everything to work seamlessly (for the most part.) So I'm back to where I was, except this time the VPN provider is different.
Their customer support admitted that this is a new feature and they're going to eventually improve it, and somewhat on another note, they will possibly create a GUI app for desktop Linux.
So the "bad" news is that the user experience and level of cross-platform support feels second-class compared to Mullvad.
I'll see how I feel after 3 months. I'm going to start another thread with the steps I took to get port-forwarding to work with AzireVPN in a qBittorrent TrueNAS Core jail. I just feel a bit tired now. (Like I said, I hate scripting, and when I post my script, please feel free to tell me how crappy it is and write something better.)
EDIT: Leaving Mullvad, you realize how much polish and effort they put into their products and services.
- Wide cross-platform support for their GUI apps
- Local network bypass (you can still access your local network without stopping the VPN)
- Split tunneling
- Highly polished and intuitive web dashboard where you can manage connections (and previously ports), without then need to connect to a specific tunnel
- "Alias" names for your tunnels, such as "Lazy Crocodile", which lets you easily identity connections (rather than resorting to comparing the internal VPN IP addresses
- Granularity for their "wg" interfaces, broken down by country, city, and individual servers (whereas Azire is only city)
I will give Azire one thing over Mullvad: they allow
up to 10 WireGuard devices, but only 5 active simultaneous connections. Mullvad was a hard limit of "5 WireGuard devices in total." This means with Azire, you can at least configure beyond 5 devices, and still be able to use your VPN on all of them, so long as you don't have more than 5 devices connected at the same time. Whereas with Mullvad, once you hit 5 devices (at any point), you cannot add another device unless you first remove one.
EDIT 2: You can apparently forward a port longer than 30 days if you specify "0" when configuring one, which supposedly means "no expiration". However, the expiration date is still set to "1 year" for some reason. This isn't a problem at all. You can issue an "update" for the port, which I think just bumps it up another month? Their documentation is not clear on it.
EDIT 3: There's no assurance that AzireVPN won't follow in Mullvad's footsteps by disabling port-forwarding in the future.