Proxy & VPN Support

[brianjud]

I'm Using A VPN to bypass network shaping and throttling by the ISP and in order to use it i need proxy support.

As of now only Vuze has such a function where i can proxy all traffic.

as of now transmission is only able to proxy the tracker (having 0 transfer rate when on proxy) which does not help much with VPN support.

[charles]

Hi brianjud,

Thanks for taking the time to suggest this feature and to help make Transmission better.

I have a few thoughts about this particular request:

1. Transmission tries to be a lean, straightforward BitTorrent? client. I try to steer clear of complicated networking features like this because they're difficult to write and extremely time-consuming to debug on all platforms.

2. This feature will probably not be used by very many people. If VPNs become more common to BitTorrent? users and there's a groundswell of requests for it, I'd be more willing to look into this. But right now it looks like a lot of work for very little payoff.

3. It's not polite to set priorities and milestones unless you've already talked it over with the development team. Trac is mostly to blame for this; it doesn't seem to offer fine-grained control over who can set what ticket attributes. Still, walking into trac with a fairly involved and esoteric request, and saying it's now our highest priority, is not how things should be done. ;)

Unless someone contributes a fully-tested patch to implement this, this feature doesn't make sense for Transmission right now. I do appreciate your interest in improving Transmission though.

[Elbandi]

brianjud: What happen, if you set the bind-address to vpn address?

[User294]

VPNs are quite common for BitTorrent? users because some ISPs started to abuse traffic classification techniques to reduce speeds of BitTorrent? or even completely stop it and even encryption not always helps if ISP gone far enough to analyse traffic patterns rather than actual content. As for me, dev's should play on users side in such scenario and help to get things working rather than simply ignore users problem (else it sounds like "we have too many users, go to hell, Luke - we do not care that you can't use our program at all"). Look, at these days even IM clients (Pidgin, Kopete, whatever!) does support for example socks 5 proxy and I can divert all connections (even file transfers) via proxy. So there is very little excuse when bittorrent client does not supports it. Sure, there are some troubles with it and it is a suboptimal solution. But don't you think it's better to up- and down- load at sub-optimal speed rather than get NOTHING at all?

On other hand, brianjud, if you need to get things working and quickly, why not to set up NAT on a VPN box? Then you may also want to forward some ports to your machine for sure. This makes it easy to use all apps, even those dumb ones which are not proxy-aware. And that's also a good networking experience, etc. Which seems to be quite useful and valuable skill in this world where anyone started to abuse their firewalls and traffic classifiers to make some harm to us, the users.

[brianjud]

I have tried re-routing all my traffic using VPN. by using that method internet connection will be slow even in regards to web surfing. my VPN is based in the UK and the US. But i'm in Malaysia so there will high latency and also packet loss rendering some pages inaccessible. that is what i do when i use transmission( i route all my traffic.)

Thats why i hope that maybe someone can develop this awesome app by adding that support for socks 4 or 5.

Can i reopen this ticket? i would like to reopen am afraid that i might step on someone shoes

[charles]

I have tried re-routing all my traffic using VPN. by using that method internet connection will be slow even in regards to web surfing. my VPN is based in the UK and the US. But i'm in Malaysia so there will high latency and also packet loss rendering some pages inaccessible. that is what i do when i use transmission( i route all my traffic.)

Yeah I understood this was an important issue to you when you marked it as our highest priority.

None of this changes the reasons I outlined in my first comment about why this ticket is not going to happen in Transmission unless someone submits a tested, debugged patch for it. This is a feature that few people will use, will be hard to write, and time-consuming to debug.

I'm trying to be polite about this because I understand this is an important feature to you but you need to understand that this is a difficult feature that very few people are clamoring for. Why not follow User294's suggestion of how to set this up yourself?

User294: please also see ticket #2702