Recently, we had a user approach us with the following problem.
“I use myPlex sharing and when I connect to my VPN I am not able to use this because my VPN service provider doesn’t support port forwarding or split tunneling. I only want my UsenetServer and NZBmatrix to route through VPN.”
This usually occurs because VPN services force all traffic to go through the VPN. On top of that, the software they provide doesn’t include the functionality required to specify exactly what traffic should go through the VPN. So, what we need to do is get a setup that stops all network traffic from going through the VPN when connected to the VPN connection. Then, we need to specify what routes should go through the VPN connection. This is achievable by a number of ways, but our method will require us to have the following:
What’s required?
- VPN Service Provider (This guide will be using IPVanish, read our review here)
- OpenVPN Client Viscosity (Available for Mac & Windows)
Let’s begin the setup.
Step 1: Install Viscosity. The installation is pretty self explanatory. Just click next until the installation is completed.
Step 2: Next, launch the application.
Step 3: Next, we need to load our VPN service provider’s config into Viscosity. This contains all the available VPN servers for the specific provider.
Remember, this guide assumes you are signed up with IPVanish VPN. If not, head over to the Viscosity website to find out how to import your VPN service provider’s config . For IPVanish, download the configs here: Configs ZIP Link
Step 4: Extract all the contents of the ZIP file you just downloaded into a folder. I dumped them all into a folder called “configs” on my desktop, but feel free to put them anywhere. Just remember the location.
Step 5: Now, let’s load them into Viscosity. Hit the + > Import Connection > From File
Step 6: Now, select the server you’d like to load into Viscosity. Do so by selecting the file and clicking “Open”. In this example, I will add “ipvanish-US-Atlanta-atl-a01”. Feel free to add as many as you’d like by repeating this step.
Step 7: With the server now successfully added. Highlight the server from the list and click “Edit”.
The next few steps will achieve the following:
- Stop all network traffic from going through the VPN when connected to the VPN connection.
- Specify what routes should go through the VPN connection.
Step 8: After clicking “Edit” you will see a new screen appear. Navigate to the “Advance” tab. Add “route-nopull” (without the quotes) into the text box as seen below.
Step 9: Once completed, head over to the “Networking” tab and click the + button. We will now add what traffic we would like to route through the VPN.
Step 10: You will now see a screen similar to the image below. In the screenshot, you will also see the IP Address for NZBmatrix.com “86.24138.81”. Click “Add” to add the route into the table. Any traffic to NZBmatrix.com will now go through the VPN.
Step 11: You can look up IP addresses for websites by using the “nslookup www.Website.com” command in cmd prompt. Keep in mind, some websites might have multiple IP Addresses. Add both if you run across any instances like this.
Step 12: Now that you have added the IP Addresses click the “Save” button. Then, let’s connect to the VPN by locating the Viscosity Icon in the task bar and clicking “Connect VPN server Name” Input your VPN Service User name and Password and you should successfully connect to the VPN.
That’s basically it. The setup shouldn’t have been too complicated for most users. Hopefully you all see how this could be beneficially to your setup. You can continue to enjoy the benefits of your hi-speed connections, but also add a level of privacy to your web browsing.
As always, please make sure to post any comments, questions, or concerns below.
THANKS A MILLION!
No problem. Hope this helped!
Great to see new Content on this site!
Keep going, Total Htpc
Thanks for the motivation Mike!
Is there a similar program out there you can recommend for OSX? I use a Mac Mini for my Plex server, and would love to set this up.
Viscosity is actually available for OSX as well. http://www.sparklabs.com/viscosity/download/
Let us know how things work out.
maybe a dumb question here….but….in your guide, you have nzbmatrix set to got through VPN, while other traffic does not. However, once the .nzb is pulled, how would you set SAB to go through VPN?…apply the same setup as with nzbmatrix, where you look up the IP for whatever provider you have, and add that as a route for VPN traffic?
Exactly, you’ll need to do a nslookup on your usenet providers. Example: “nslookup news.newshosting.com” that will give you the IP address for newshosting.com. Plug that into viscosity, and the traffic will flow through the VPN. Hope that helps.
Is there any way to confirm that the usenet traffic is going via the VPN?
Because I am not seeing a drop is speed like I’m used to before I had route-nopull and ip line.
I’m going to give this a go tonight. After reading your other articles, I have been running IPVanish on my router. All clients are routed through the VPN. I think a better solution for me will be to selectively route my traffic with IPVanish. I have tried a few different VPN providers, and the speed/ latency cost can be too much at times. Especially when gaming.
I just picked up an i7 Mac mini to run my Plex/SAB/CP/SB activities, and routing just the essentials through the VPN seems like it will fit my setup, temperament, and needs much better!
As always, great articles man. This site is amazing.
-Jay
Hey Jay, hope things go smoothly. We learned from other Mac users that a reboot might be necessary after running through the guide. Give that a shot if you run into any issues.
Sounds like this could be a great setup for you. Let us know how things work out and thanks for reading.
Yep- a reboot was required. Not used to having to do that with OSX… I gotta say, Viscosity has an awesome interface. Very easy setup as well! I really wasn’t prepared for what a cool program it is.
Viscosity is humming along, I am now getting SABnzbd and Sickbeard to play nice again. I was running them on my Synology 1512+ before, but am looking forward to using supported versions of the programs on OSX so I can update without worrying about using a NAS build.
Now if only I could get SickBeard to start on it’s own in Mountain Lion… UGH. lol
-Jay
How has SickBeard been running for you on Mountain Lion? Is your only problem getting it to launch on start up?
Will allow me to access my tuners from a computer not on my network, but connected through vpn? So I can stream live tv over vpn?
Yes, in theory it should. Input the IP into Viscosity and see how it works out. Could you let us know what happens?
Sickbeard works great for me on Mountain Lion. I have had three minor issues so far. Other than these, it works as good or better than ever!
1) Getting Sickbeard to start automatically at startup. I still haven’t cracked this one. I’ve read a couple of threads about creating a script to do the python commands, but I have no clue how to do it in Automator. Ya, basic stuff I know, but I have never messed with scripting, and the automator tool is confusing the crap outta me… lol
2) Sickbeard freezing up after a few hours, requiring it to restart… I fixed this by not running it as a daemon. I just run it in a terminal window, and minimize it. It works great.
3) Once I upgraded Sickbeard to the latest version, it quit putting my shows in their season folders. instead it just creates a new episode folder, and drops t on the shows named folder. I think I just need to play with the naming settings a bit to fix that.
On the sickbeard freezing thing, i noticed i had to turn off “put hard disks to sleep when possible.” that seemed to fix that problem for me.
Easiest/most reliable way I’ve found to get stuff like Sickbeard, Headphones, SAB, etc., to launch at login/startup is to use the program Lingon (http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/lingon-3/id450201424?ls=1&mt=12)
You just write your terminal command and tell it when to run, and it works automagically forever… “python /path/to/your/sb/install/Sickbeard.py -d”
Thanks for the great tutorial, but it doesn’t really help my case.
My ISP is blocking all P2P traffic, I just bought a vpn server, and utorrent is working again. The issue is : I have 20Mbits/s connection, going through the VPN limits my connection to 4Mbits/s, which is very slow when downloading torrents at the same time. I want to know if there is a way to force only P2P traffic through the VPN, and leave the rest of the bandwidth for other usage ?
Thanks !
@hiddeneyes02. Please read the following with the understanding that I haven’t tried this, I don’t know if it will work, and I don’t know if there will be any negative side effects. Here goes – I wonder if you could configure Viscosity to route localhost (127.0.0.1) traffic only. If so, you could then configure uTorrent with the localhost IP set as the Proxy inside the application. I imagine you would only want to forward if localhost is being used on a specific port (that you configure in uTorrent). I don’t know if Viscosity supports configuring a specific IP and Port.
Great article thx.
But I would like to do but the opposite. I would like to send all traffic through the VPN, EXCEPT the myPlex ip. Is that possible?.
I have got sanbz working great, using sickbeard and couch potato plugins. All was working great until DMCA crackdown, I since have been forced to use torrents with usenet. My issue is that I got a notice from my ISP about the torrents. I then got slick VPN to hide my IP. I have setup Open VPN and it was working great then
BAM second notice from DMCA, what happen?
Well after research found that when my VPN tunnel drops the server gets a new public ip and for just a little while will add me to the trackers on the torrents and then i get found.
Is there a way to force my server to see that the tunnel is down and to stop utorent traffic until the tunnel has been re-established?
Good tute btw.
Check out this article to keep your IP private/kill your downloads when your VPN drops. VPN dropping isn’t the only issue you have to worry about BTW.
http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-make-vpns-even-more-secure-120419/
I have Plex Media Server setup to user NZBGet and and NZBDrone (works faster that SABnzbd with sickbeard). I am using port forwarding to access my media outside of my local network. However, when I turn on SlickVPN, I can no longer access my media files from outside of my network. I did everything written here using Viscosity but I am still unable to access the media via Plex Media Server outside of my network. Is this even possible? If the VPN is truly hiding my IP, perhaps it’s impossible to access my files…what are your thoughts/suggestions?
I followed these instructions exactly using both IPVanish and Viscosity but am unable to connect my plex server to make it available outside my network. Once I connect Viscosity do I also need to connect IPVanish to the same server? Or does Viscosity take care of that?
Thanks for share a nice article. If you want to secure and fast browsing vpn you can go https://www.torrentguard.com/ .
excellent guide
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