Starting up any VPN service, and then fire up uTorrent is easy!
But what happens if your VPN connection goes down and you get disconnected from the service?
Some torrents takes forever to download, and you’re not always at your computer. During the night for instance, your VPN tunnel could go down while you sleep, and you would be totally unaware that you’re computer now downloads on your regular network connection.
What uTorrent does during a VPN disconnection is to reset all it’s connections, and start back up again on the regular network connection that is not encrypted.
In this tutorial we are using VPN service from Private Internet Access. Click here to learn more!
So how to prevent this (in uTorrent)?
A serious torrent client should always have a configuration section where the user can force the client to only use one specific network adapter. Usually your computer has at least one adapter. If you have installed a VPN client software, you should have two. Some computers have a WiFi adapter installed either on the motherboard, or any external cards or dongles, so don’t panic if you find more! Anyhow, the trick is to find out which one is used for your VPN service.
To do this, we need to find out what the VPN’s “local” IP address is that we want to force bind to the torrent client. So the first thing we need to do is to start up our VPN service and connect to it. Once it has a connection, click the Windows Key, or open your start menu (PS: This is a guide for the Windows OS if you haven’t figured that out by now). Now we need to open the command prompt terminal, so to do that we simply type;
cmd
… and hit enter.
This should open up the black terminal window. Once it’s opened, type in;
ipconfig
… and hit enter again.
This will drop down a lot of text, that might be overwhelming for some, but fear not. What is actually being printed is the most used information about your internet adapters.
So, what we want to look for is the “IPv4 Address” of the VPN adapter.
I shall admit that if you have a lot of adapters it won’t be easy to find some times. But what we want to look for is the line below that could be quite revealing. Usually on the other adapters, the line below “IPv4 Address” that says “Subnet Mask” will often (if not always) have one of the following values;
- 255.0.0.0
- 255.255.0.0
- 255.255.255.0
Pay attention to the “0” at the end. That zero tells us (in this case) that the adapter is able to communicate with at least 254 other devices, and if the adapter has this zero at the end in the “Subnet Mask” line, its most likely NOT that one. In the terminal window image above you can see that the end is “252” which reveals to us that this adapter is only able to communicate with 2 other devices, so this must be the one I’m looking for.
Should you pick the wrong one, fear not! We will test it to make sure it’s correct.
Now remember the IPv4 address (or write it down) as we will need this now.
Open up your uTorrent client.
Go to “Options” and then to “Preferences”.
Now here is the tricky part (Not really), click on the “Advanced” section.
Mind the “WARNING” at the top. This is true, and can cause things to stop working!
The Advanced section will spew tons of configuration out on you, but there is luckily a filter *Phew!*
On the “Filter” type in “ip”, this will narrow it down a lot!
Now look for “net.bind_ip” and “net.outgoing_ip“.
These are the one’s we want. Remember that IPv4 Address you should remember (or write down)?
Yes, that goes here..
Fill in the value section with your IPv4 Address, and click “Set”.
And that’s it!
Let’s test it..
Now while connected to the VPN, start a download. If this address is correct, the download will start as normal, and be going through your VPN connection. To test if it really do that and that it won’t just switch over to the regular network during a disconnection, we simply try to disconnect from the VPN service. Once the connection goes down, all downloads/uploads should drop down to “0”, and connecting should appear in the bottom bar of the software. If, nothing happens and the connecting text is permanent then Good job!
Should the downloads resume then something is wrong, and you most likely have picked the wrong IPv4 Address from the black terminal window.
Also want to mention, should nothing work then it’s also most likely a wrong IPv4 address from the black terminal window.
Play around with the IPv4 addresses, and should you decide to drop the idea of only going through the VPN connection, there is a reset button on the values we set so everything goes back to normal again..
A thing worth mentioning is that the IPv4 address we set in the advanced section usually change over time. Every VPN provider has different release time on the address they give you, so over time this needs to be changed to the new one you get.
Think that’s too much work? Well, there are some torrent clients out there that have integrated a VPN helper that do all this for you as long as you have started the VPN connection before opening the client. One of those torrent clients are Vuze BitTorrent Client should that be of interest..
Thanks for reading, and good luck!
NB! – NB! – NB! – NB!
DigitalBrekke is not responsible for any damage to your system/software that may occur.
Also, torrents are NOT illegal, but downloading/uploading PiracyWare is!
This guide is NOT aimed towards piracy!
What you choose to do is on you!