Sunday, May 3, 2026 at 11:06 AM
I use a VPN for torrenting. The way it used to work was that I would have to go to a webpage on my server to turn on the VPN. Then, I would have qBittorrent connect to a SOCKS5 proxy on my server that makes everything go through the VPN. The problem with that setup was that magnet links would not work. I used to have to convert them to torrent files with magnet2torrent.com. I recently discovered that you can setup qBittorrent to use a specific network interface. I also discovered that you can setup new VLAN interfaces on macOS. Now, I have my TP-Link ER605 router connect to NordVPN. I setup a separate LAN just for VPN. Then I made sure that the VLAN can reach my iMac : Starkink -> ER605 router -> big managed switch -> small managed switch -> iMac I finally added a new network interface for VLAN 9 on my iMac. My iMac now gets a second IPv4 address (in the 192.168.9.0/24 subnet). It works great ! I can make sure it works by running : curl --interface vlan1 ifconfig.me and getting my VPN's IP address. (vlan0 is used to access my mom's Rogers cellular modem) Unfortunately, I am still limited to 5 connections when downloading torrents. When using Rogers, I do not have this limit (I frequently reach 100 connections).