I’m a long-time Transmission user but I just learned that VPN killswitches are a thing (how did it take me so long!?). I would like to try another client which has this feature in case I forget to launch my VPN client before opening Transmission. Does anybody have any recommendations? Deluge? QBittorrent? Or any others?
UPDATE: Thanks for the suggestions everyone! I decided to give qbittorrent a try and have been enjoying it so far.
I followed these steps to bind it to my VPN from on Linux:
- Pause torrents
- Connect VPN
- Open qBittorrent. Go to Preferences, and then Advanced tab
- Change network interface to tun0. If unsure, disconnect VPN and restart qBittorrent then repeat step 1 to see which interface appears.
- Restart qBittorrent
- Test it out on the official kubuntu torrent or your favourite distro from LinuxTracker.org. Turn your VPN on and off while verifying whether it pauses and resumes downloading.
If you’re using Nord VPN then you can enable a kill switch directly in the VPN through a console command which is documented on the Nord docs. It works, I tested it.
I would not rely on Nord’s VPN killswitch. It can be slow and unreliable and still briefly expose your IP to the swarm. I got an ISP letter thinking I was protected through nord’s killswitch, but turns out it was not completely covering me.
I would bind the client to the wireguard network interface directly through the client. In Qbittorrent you can do it pretty easily as @[email protected] mentioned.
Mullvad has one right in the GUI too, it’s called “Lockdown Mode” IIRC.
Also qBittorrent has a thing in preferences where you can bind it to a specific network interface, so you can just set it to whatever your VPN uses (for Mullvad Wireguard it’s ‘wg-mullvad’) and then if the VPN goes down it just won’t do anything.