Ensure traffic only over VPN?

[azirath@gmail.com]

I was just wondering if there was a way to force utorrent to only use my VPN connection?

The problem i have is that sometimes the VPN connection might be lost (and might or might not be restored by auto-redial). When this happens traffic simply re-routes through my normal internet connection. I would prefer utorrent to never transmit data over anything but my VPN connection.

Should utorrent not have any options for, do anyone then know how to accomplish the above (i dont mind that it applies to all programs) for example using IPSec?

[jewelisheaven]

There is an option under Ctrl-P -> Advanced called net.bind_ip . You should read up in the µManual about specific usage

[azirath@gmail.com]

Thanks for the tip, however i dont like reading this in the manual:

Note that Windows will sometimes ignore this setting and use other adapters. There is no known fix for this.

Anyway, i just wrote a C# program to startup utorrent only if the VPN is up and terminate utorrent if the VPN goes down. I suppose it should do the trick.

[jewelisheaven]

Yea that would wok just as well

[chjones]

Hi all, I have a way to do this that works very well for me. I use SwissVPN for my torrents and had the same issue of uTorrent using my normal DSL if the VPN went down. I ended up doing the following:

1. Installed VMware Player or VMware Workstation. Player is free, but I use VMware Workstation.

2. Create a VM running Windows (I run Windows 7 on my PC, and Windows XP on the VM).

3. Configure the VM's networking to be bridged to your local network. This means the VM gets it's own IP on your network.

4. Configure a static IP on the VM. Only configure the IP, Subnet Mask and DNS Server. DO NOT enter a default gateway.

5. Add a persistent static route (the route remains after a reboot) with the "route add x.x.x.x netmask x.x.x.x metric x -p" command. In the IP to route to, I added the subnet of SwissVPN. You can just do a ping of the name your VPN connects to and use that single IP, but I added the entire subnet as SwissVPN seem to have a few different IPs I can connect to.

6. In the VM, create a VPN connection and test it works.

7. Install uTorrent on the VM and go nuts!

Now, if I am not connected to the VPN in the VM I am unable to browse the internet. The VM can not communicate outside of my local LAN. Once the VPN connects, the VM obtains a default route from SwissVPN and routes all traffic to them. You shouldn't need any firewall or port forwarding rules on your router/modem for uTorrent to work as all traffic is encrypted over your VPN so the router/modem can't see inside the VPN anyway.

This works brilliantly for me, so just thought I'd share it. There is absolutely no danger of accidently using my ISP connection for torrent downloads.

[nb123]

Btw, on this topic, if I'm using expressvpn (based on openvpn), will utorrent automatically use the VPN connection to tunnel traffic if the VPN is up?