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Is a selfhosted VPN viable for piracy? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey everyone! One of my main issues with piracy in general are VPNs, because I absolutely HATE subscription services.

As far as i'm concerned, we need VPNs so that when torrenting, people cant see our IP adress and other information that can be potentially used againt us. I've heard that there's people who log those IP adresses so that they can like "report" people doing piracy or sth like that. Correct me if i'm wrong.

So, with this purpose in mind, I understand that VPN services are useful because they can help hide our real information. But as I said, I dont like subscription services and I saw that there's the option to selfhost a VPN.

But I thought a bit about it, and, if I'm using a selfhosted VPN using, for example, a raspberry pi or a laptop, isn't the imformation of that laptop ALSO potentially dangerous? Because it is connected to your own ISP and it has the same location as you have (if you set it up at yout home).

I know this may sound dumb, but I don't know much about this. And I can't find information about this.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes, but you have to keep in mind part of the point of the VPN is so that it's not running on your home network and exposing your home IP. Having an RPI or laptop running OpenVPN server from your home isn't going to help you in terms of privacy when you're just exposing your home IP. Also, running your own VPN means you will have a dedicated IP which will be tied to you versus running a commercial VPN which would have shared IPs (but likely wouldn't offer port-forwarding so it would be worthless for seedboxes).

What I do on mine is rent a cheap VPS with unlimited bandwidth, I run OpenVPN server on that VPS using Nyr’s openvpn-install script and then on my local seedbox server I connect to my OpenVPN server. I have qbittorrent-nox listening on the tun0 interface on my local seedbox, and then on my OpenVPN server VPS I have an iptables prerouting rule to route traffic from the inbound torrent port to my local seedbox server.

It works very well for me, even though I only use private trackers so it's overkill in my case.