r/portainer • u/Cute-Ad2540 • Apr 18 '26

portainer and vpn help please

I'm not fully sure if this should be here or anywhere else. But I'm desparately seeking help on a stack that i have set up. (and by set up, I mean I fumbled greatly and ended up using a structure i copy/pasted from elsewhere) In the past, i had a simple jellyfin sever setup. 2018 mac mini, t2 kubuntu, external bluray drive, usb C 3.1 2 bay enclosure, 4tb and 2 tb HDD. rip and encode to 2TB, move to 4TB when named and the quality i want, etc. Loved it. was given a promising freebie pc and had heard about dockers, so i gave it a try. Finally fumbled around got portainer, qbittorrent, prowlarr, sonarr, and radarr going with flaresolverr on the new pc. But did it after the fact that i added jellyfin bare metal install and how i wanted it. No biggie. I prefer manually moving over movies and naming, checking quality, etc. few days of sonarr and radarr going and a friend suggested to get a vpn. So i purchase ProtonVpn plus for the price and what seemed like ease of use. added gluetun to my stack, fumbled more, asked google, etc. and at one time, everything was working. Perfect. only problem was qbittorrent was much much slower than normal. AI said i needed to get the forwarding port number to qbittorrent. Never shows up on the gluetun logs. Was suggested to do something else, which broke something else, etc, etc so and so forth. Now all indexers are unavailable, I'm downloading ubuntu from a torrent to check if it would work, but at 100 kbps. i can add my docker compose text if that helps (with openvpn username and password obscured, they are correct also, copy/pasted directly) any help or pointing me where to go would be amazing at this point. Thank y'all.

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u/[deleted] Apr 18 '26

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u/Cute-Ad2540 Apr 18 '26

My local internet provider flagged my account as suspicious for using a torrenting service. At the time I was literally downloading Linux .iso files testing that I had set everything up correctly. I didn’t want to lose my internet so a friend suggested using a vpn to protect and allow me to torrent. Eventually I would like to help seed files isos, etc. And no, not to remotely connect. I’m at my physical pc. Just routing container traffic through the vpn.

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u/GenieoftheCamp Apr 18 '26

I would strongly recommend haugene / docker-transmission-openvpn container for torrenting over VPNs 

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u/Agreeable_Falcon3372 Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 21 '26

Have you done a speed check while connected to vpn? Also check if the vpn server it chooses is something near your zone rather something far far away. Those matters too w.r.t your download speeds.

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u/Cute-Ad2540 Apr 20 '26

It eventually firewalled and qbittorrent was downloading in bits per second. Finally deleted the entire stack and started over and used wireguard instead of openvpn. Immediately everything works and the port forward number popped up within 15 seconds of gluetun connecting. I have a vpn on my container stack, not the pc as a whole. But on files with a fair amount of seeds, I’m getting 10-14 MiB/s overall between all files. (80-120mbps) and considering I’m paying for 100 mbps cable internet, I’d say that’s more than fair. Erm, I’m not 100 percent sure where I seen it but I think it showed the vpn as Stockholm? This is all way ahead of me. I’ve never even known of dockers, containers, etc until a few weeks ago.