Hello, I have recently purchased a subscription to hide.me, and I was wondering how to set up port forwarding with my torrenting client, qBittorrent. Hide.me offers dynamic port forwarding, but try as I may, I cannot find the port that it is using to input into the “Listening Port” field in my settings. I tried running `netstat -aon` in cmd but that returned about 30 different ports. It was my (quite basic) understanding that dynamic port forwarding would just mean that my open port changes every time I connect, but I thought there would be some way to actually see the open port. I did a little bit of rudimentary research and I saw something about Glutun, but I’m fairly new to this. Any help is appreciated. What do I need to do?
I’ve reviewed the hide.me documentation and gained some insights into what you can do. Firstly, with dynamic port forwarding, the port used is not predetermined - you won’t know which one it is. The application you’re using will automatically select an available port using the UPnP protocol.
To set this up, input “0” in the listening port field and ensure that the “use UPnP/NAT-PMP port in my router” option is checked. qBittorrent will then handle the port selection for you.
However, it’s essential to note that, as per the official documentation, hide.me only supports dynamic port forwarding in their Premium plan, and you’ll need to explicitly activate this feature in their client, and you can find instructions here: https://hide.me/en/knowledgebase/how-do-i-activate-dynamic-port-forwarding/
I hope this information is helpful. Cheers!
Edit: and don’t forget to bind your VPN to qBittorrent
It worked like a charm! I have 500/500 and I’ve already uploaded around 70 GiB! Upload speeds are way up
In case more people reading: “UPnP/NAT-PMP” brings security concerns and potential vector of attack for your network:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/bslurd/security_impact_of_port_forward_or_upnp_natpmp/
- UPnP & NAT-PMP | pfSense Documentation.
I would strongly suggest you never enable it on your router.
For port forwarding you can look into writing own script, something like this: GitHub - soxfor/qbittorrent-natmap: The objective of this container is to run a script that requests a port forward (via NAT-PMP) from the VPN provider and upon success changes the listening port of the qBittorrent client when running in Docker
agree , its dynamic port forwarding is amazing , and dont enable bolt proxy ,( it gives more speed but you will face less peer connecting and few tracker stops seeding )
I’m pleased to assist you.
I’m curious to know if this solution really worked.
Could you let us know if you pass the Open port test? (if you don’t trust this site you can use any other in the Google search result for "test port).
To find the automatically selected port at a specific moment in qBittorrent with these configurations, navigate to View > Log > Show. Open the log tab that appears and look for entries that indicate “listening to port X”.
Indeed, it’s a terrible idea to have UPnP enabled on the router, and even hide.me’s VPN service makes it challenging for the user to set it up. Furthermore, if UPnP is enabled on both the VPN and the router simultaneously, their documentation warns that it can cause conflicts.
As for scripts like this one, it only makes sense for those running qBittorrent on Docker because in native Windows and Linux versions, there’s a built-in option to use the router/VPN provider’s UPnP feature. What the script does is redirect the port of the Docker instance where qBittorrent is running.
If I don’t enable “UPnP/NAT-PMP” on my router(in my case pfsense) but enable in qbittorrent, I’m ok?
Yes, it does. With this configuration, every time you start and stop qBittorrent, a new port will be chosen. The thing is, it will be selected and set up automatically.
It worked. This is port from logs.
Edit: can’t attach pics but yes port is open. I also use split tunneling and limit port forwarding to only qBittorrent within hide.me app. So none of my other traffic is affected
do not see any reason to enable it in qbit, just set port directly and statically
Ah nice. Thanks for the reply, my curiosity was killing me haha.
But for hide.me VPN, they use dynamic port forwarding.
then you went with wrong provider in the first place. There ways how to do it, basically having script setting correct port for you. But I do not use them, so can’t suggest
Hide.me is recommended by Avistaz because of that feature. I will just post in the Avistaz forum to ask. Thank you so much for your help.
it is up to you, but I never buy “recommended” per se advertised.