Hey everyone. I’m curious, how can I ensure that Download Station is using my PIA VPN connection? (I have the “Use gateway on remote connection” option set). The reason I’m asking is I recently installed a speedtest docker container and it shows the same speed whether I’m connected to VPN or not.
Any ideas?
SSH to the Synology, and run “curl api.ipify.org”. This gives you your public IP, as seen by sites you connect to.
If you’re concerned about leakage, I wouldn’t use Download Station. The reason is that if your VPN connection is lost, Download Station happily keeps downloading on your unprotected home internet link, and you’ll have ISP letters faster than you can say “Marvel movies suck” (at least it was like this 3 years ago, haven’t used it since). Can you guarantee that PIA server won’t ever go down for 2 minutes overnight?
Since you have Docker, you should look into a container which provides torrent client (with web interface) + VPN client. For example: GitHub - haugene/docker-transmission-openvpn: Docker container running Transmission torrent client with WebUI over an OpenVPN tunnel , there’s more like it. The VPN connection is contained entirely within the Docker container, and the container is designed so that if the VPN link goes down, the torrent client is shut down automatically until it reconnects. /r/selfhosted can probably help you here, or /r/privacy, or /r/datahoarder.
Curious about that also 
Hi all. Thanks for the info so far. I’m interested in setting this up for my NAS as well, using NordVPN, although I’m not familiar with Docker. Is there an easy how-to available, or is it possible to do this in a few steps? Any further info is much appreciated
This is the right answer. Also, you don’t need to use a combined BT+VPN image. You can set up your containers to go through a virtual network which only routes through the vpn container and the same will apply - if the vpn container loses connection, the other containers won’t connect to the Internet. I use the following (with expressvpn) but you can replace the vpn container with a PIA one.
If it helps, here’s my Docker-compose. Note that I have to have Sonarr, jackett etc go through the vpn because in the UK many/most of the indexers are blocked by ISPs, so you need the vpn to access them. Sample Docker-compose file which shows how to set up Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, Lidarr, QBittorrent and a VPN container so that all all traffic from the containers is routed through the VPN. Also includes Plex and get_iplayer containers, which are not routed through the VPN. · GitHub
This is great advice. Thank you very much!
Thanks for this but I’m not sure how this helps with my Synology. Loading the torrent file in Download Station doesn’t update the IP address in my browser since it’s a different IP address?