My VPN plan is up for renewal, and I'd like to move from my current provider (Privado) to one that supports port forwarding while maintaining access to a SOCKS5 service.

AirVPN would have been my choice, but doesn't have SOCKS5.

Private Internet Access checks off the boxes but I'm not familiar with the company behind it.

Thanks for the help and recommendations.

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[–] TauZero@mander.xyz 14 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Curious, what is SOCKS5 used for that regular wireguard cannot do? I'm only familiar with the use case of telling Firefox to connect through a SOCKS5 proxy, which may be convenient as a form of split tunneling - only firefox traffic goes through the VPN and everything else through clearnet - but wireguard can be configured into a split tunnel form as well with a bit more work, and works for all software not just the ones aware of SOCKS proxies. Is it for use on a system where your permissions are too limited to turn on wireguard but not so limited that you cannot change Firefox proxy settings?

[–] uninvitedguest@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

Thanks for the question - I value the ease of configuring SOCKS5 directly in an application. As you mentioned, WireGuard split tunneling can be done with a bit more work - which is knowledge I don't have at the moment and will take time to acquire.

My ISP is not proactive in deep scanning my traffic, so SOCKS5 has been entirely sufficient in in covering me against copyright notices for the past years.

I have Gluetun ready to go for for my torrent program on my server that I can better seed, but on my workstation I'm typically not running a VPN - and the odd time I might fire up a torrent program it is nice to have the proxy settings baked in to the application in case I forget to or don't care to toggle the VPN on.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

SOCKS like the other proxy types can be configured per application and not exclusively as an interface in kernel mode or something else in userspace mode.

[–] TauZero@mander.xyz 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

can be configured per application

wireguard can too using network namespaces

not exclusively as an interface in kernel mode

Which devices are you people running where you want VPN/proxy but don't have kernel permissions to run wireguard? Firefox on iPhone? Porn on wifi washing machine?

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 4 points 2 days ago

Something like that IDK.