I’ve been watching Tom’s Youtube videos for almost a year now and they’ve been really helpful for setting up pfsense.
I recently got NordVPN and tried setting up a OpenVPN UDP connection. It will download at 300Mb for a few seconds and then goes offline (connection is 400Mb down). With a TCP connection the max download is 60Mb, but it’s stable and doesn’t go offline.
Since NordVPN allows multiple connections per account, I’m thinking I could put our 2 TVs on 1 VPN connection, my kids stuff on a second connection, my PC on a third and IOT on a fourth.
I tried searching but keep finding other scenarios. My question is, how do I get port 443 on multiple NordVPN servers connected to different ports coming into my pfsense?
Since I’m new to networking, if there’s a better way to resolve this, please let me know.
Thanks,
BorgTech
I have not used NordVPN so not sure why it’s stopping when using UDP but there is proabably some tuning setting NordVPN recommends that you have overlooked. These VPN connections are outbound so you can have the same port coming from your system, not sure if/how Nord supports multiple connection from the same system to the same VPN.
I don’t use Nord but have setup AirVPN you can check them out https://airvpn.org/ I’ve found them to be pretty good getting about 95% of the speed of my ISP.
With AirVPN you can download the certs you need for different servers on different ports using different protocols. You should be able to do that with your provider. If you can’t just move.
I think your actual question is how to use your 5 connections instead of only 1 ? The way you want to do it doesn’t make much sense.
A better way is to setup your different openvpn clients on pfSense. Then put these in a gateway group, you can set the trigger for the fastest connection. If the server goes down, the gateway with switch the traffic to next available server. (Occasionally I notice that my VPN does that when I’m logged into pfsense). On your vlan rules set the gateway to the VPN Group.
You can also setup your own OpenVPN RAS server but use the VPN Group as your gateway.
Hence you can use your VPN for both devices at home and on the go.
You can easily just ping the Nord VPN servers and select the fastest, you’ll probably get better speeds if the servers aren’t overloaded.
If you get 5 connections, then I would setup 10 VPN clients, as it takes a while to configure everything, it will be easier to swap over servers in the future if you need to if the performance goes down.
I’ve had this setup running for a couple of years at two locations without any issues.
If you do have some issues, it may come down to the version of OpenVPN running on your VPN’s server and on pfSense, you’ll have fewer issues if they are the same.
Looks like I had a senior moment! I just noticed the OpenVPN Client setup in pfsense has a setting for Local Port. So I set them to 51443, 52443 and 53433. Now when I run a speed test on a device on each vlan, they each get about 60Mb down. Now I don’t have to worry about multiple video streams using up the entire 60Mb VPN throughput and slowing everything down.
For some reason I thought it would be more complicated and need NAT or something.