Access home FTP server through VPN connection

russ9898 · 3 Jun 2014 at 21:42

Hi guys,

I have a VPN connection setup through PIA on my File Server at home. On the file server i host a number of services for myself to gain remote access such as an FTP server as well as streaming of live TV from Mediaportal TV server.

Is there anyway to configure my PIA VPN to allow me to connect to the file server remotely whilst keeping the VPN tunnel active?

Thanks,

Russ

Rainmaker · 4 Jun 2014 at 00:08

In short, no. You can map one single service to the (random, changeable) port provided by PIA but that's your lot.

I'd recommend going over to AirVPN. They allow you to specify up to twenty ports which can also be mapped to different local ports on your machine. For example you can't forward port 80 (it's reserved by the VPN servers), but you could forward port 26228 to local port 80.

They also allow you to use their authoritive DNS system so you can set port 26228 to point to your machine's port 80 webserver and assign it a DNS name of webserver.airvpn.org and that name will thenceforth resolve to your home server via the VPN. You can map up to 20 such names (eg mytorrents.airvpn.org resolves to your rtorrent install listening on port 92837).

Very useful and way more advanced than the poor show provided by PIA.

russ9898 · 4 Jun 2014 at 14:56

Thanks for that Rainmaker. That was most informative, fortunately i only purchased a months subscription so once that has lapsed I will look to subscribe to AirVPN.

I presume they are your VPN provider of choice, if so how do you find speeds etc?

Thanks,

Russ

Rainmaker · 4 Jun 2014 at 15:48

Yeah I don't trust PIA at all these days, and I have about 6 months of an annual subscription remaining with them so it's not fanboyism for another company that makes me say it! Have a read around their forum (specifically the v.36 changelog and downtime threads) for info and the widespread customer dissatisfaction.

I use AirVPN these days, yes. They're honest and transparent and they even release their client software under the open source GPLv3. I'm with Virgin Media and Air give me my 152Mbps no problems even downloading torrents (which is what I was doing for this screenshot).