Help with IPvanish Please

[bizzs 0]

Hello everyone, I hate to be a bother, but I am out of ideas.  I just realized that my ipvanish vpn was not running and I turned it on. It is now blocking the remote access. I have been using emby since November and everything works great within my local network. I was enjoying the remote features while working out at the gym until recently when I turned the vpn on.

My setup is using Ubuntu 20.04 as a dedicated server with both tvheadend and emby installed only . I useTvheadend's ip m3u and it's xmltv ip as my sources.  I am using the openvpn  Ipvanish certificate configuration. The Vpn is working fine and the ip address is masked as it should.  My server has an assigned Ip address and ports 8096 and 8920 are opened on the router.  The emby dashboard is displaying the ipvanish ip address with port 8096, and the local IP address. When I try logging on remotely using the ipvanish ip address, access is timed out. The local network  ip address work fine and are protected by the vpn.

Can someone tell me what I need to change to make ipvanish work with emby remotely?

Thanks a bunch,

Lisa

[Abobader 3470]

Hello bizzs,

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Please wait for someone from staff support or our members to reply to you.

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Emby Team

[GrimReaper 4749]

8 minutes ago, bizzs said:

Hello everyone, I hate to be a bother, but I am out of ideas.  I just realized that my ipvanish vpn was not running and I turned it on. It is now blocking the remote access. I have been using emby since November and everything works great within my local network. I was enjoying the remote features while working out at the gym until recently when I turned the vpn on.

My setup is using Ubuntu 20.04 as a dedicated server with both tvheadend and emby installed only . I useTvheadend's ip m3u and it's xmltv ip as my sources.  I am using the openvpn  Ipvanish certificate configuration. The Vpn is working fine and the ip address is masked as it should.  My server has an assigned Ip address and ports 8096 and 8920 are opened on the router.  The emby dashboard is displaying the ipvanish ip address with port 8096, and the local IP address. When I try logging on remotely using the ipvanish ip address, access is timed out. The local network  ip address work fine and are protected by the vpn.

Can someone tell me what I need to change to make ipvanish work with emby remotely?

Thanks a bunch,

Lisa

IPVanish does not support port forwarding.

https://support.ipvanish.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002080173-Port-Forwarding

There's few VPNs that do (PIA, AirVPN... ), as well as there are some alternate solutions. @cayars might give you a hand there. 

[bizzs 0]

Ok, thank you for the response and hopefully @cayers will see my post..

Edited April 11, 2022 by bizzs

[CassTG 113]

Is the vpn used purely to connect to your home network? If so not sure what your set up is, but i would take a look at Tailscale, single user is free, and have to say its the most hassle free way of remoting back home. Just need to run a tailscale server on a device on your network, can be a pi, a vm, or a physical machine windows linux whatever, no port forwarding needed at all, all devices authenticate via oauth (google et all) and you get a web based admin page on their site to control everything. Tailscale is based on Wireguard vpn, and have to say it's stupidly simple and fast. Apps for IOS and Android as well as mac etc to connect with, and if you spin up the connection with local access to Lan permitted you can just pretend you are back at your house and connect locally

[bizzs 0]

Thank You cassTG for your input. Would this setup protect my original ip address and mask it to something else if I play a stream with Tailscale.  Basically,  I am using emby as a client that is receiving the m3u through tvheadend's playlist.  It works flawlessly and the tvheadend m3u is protected by ipvanish when any client is played. If I could make emby bypass the vpn, then I believe that it will work remotely.  The problem is that I have both emby and tvheadend installed on the same server and the vpn is protecting both.  For testing purposes, I installed emby on another computer and changed the port number. I opened the router using the new emby port number and this computers assigned ip address only. Emby did work remotely and was protected by the vpn through tvheadend.  The bad part is that 2 computers are needed and they will use tons of electricty if left on 24/7.

Any suggestions how to achieve bypassing the vpn so emby would not be protected and work remotely on the same server?

Thanks

Lisa~

 

[CassTG 113]

I presume you are using a windows machine so the following is based on that assumption.

Im not fully understanding who you are hiding your Ip from, is it your mobile operator when you stream or the content of said stream. I get the M3u protection.

However yes running it all on one machine does cause some looping issues, i remember testing a setup where I had a pritunl self hosted vps running on the same docker server as emby etc and i was unable to access it which made sense after a while.

Anyways

Im Presuming you want the TV Headend setup protected by Vpn, but allow remote access to Emby not via vpn (but you can use HTTPS connection to still make the data less inspectable). For that you would need to use the Split Tunneling feature, however, i have done some research and IPVanish only seems to offer split tunneling on Android / FireOS and that their Windows app does not offer this feature.

As a test i just installed the Windscribe VPN app on Windows 11 and that offers split tunneling where you can exclude apps from the vpn connection which means you could exclude Emby as you mentioned above. However that would mean finding an alternate to IPV that supports this in the windows App. I Use viscosity as my OVPN connection app of choice but that does not support split tunneling.

You could test the above with Windscribe for free as they offer 10gb free trial and see if that works for your needs

As for tailscale i presume you would face the same issue if you installed that on the same machine as emby however ill see if i can run a test in a minute to find out.

 

[bizzs 0]

Thanks for the response.  God no, no, no and no!!  I am not hiding my ip for illegal activity, I am protecting the m3u as you stated.(lol)  The tvheadend server m3u (Iptv) is protected by the vpn and works fine.  I load the tvheadend m3u playlist into emby.  Emby plays the m3u fine within the network, and the m3u is protected by the ipvanish through tvheadend when emby plays the m3u playlist. The only problem I am having is that both emby and tvheadend servers are installed on the same computer with Ipvanish.  Ipvanish is blocking emby from playing remotely because it changes over to the masked ipvanish ip instead of using the assigned isp address.  I guess I am stuck without using emby remotely because I renewed Ipvanish a few months ago for one year and I thought tunneling was capable for linux.

Thanks 

Edited April 12, 2022 by bizzs

[CassTG 113]

So the pc concerned is Linux. Are you running emby et all directly on the os or via docker

[bizzs 0]

 no docker, running straight installed on ubuntu

[CassTG 113]

Aww okay, as if it was on docker, you could probably try having one docker (tvheadend) and one VPN client docker, then you would set tvheadend to connect via the Vpn docker for internet access. Emby Docker however would then  connect to your base network and not via the vpn.

Split tunneling on Linux looks a nightmare at first glance to be honest

Edited April 12, 2022 by CassTG

[Carlo 4561]

2 hours ago, bizzs said:

Thanks for the response.  God no, no, no and no!!  I am not hiding my ip for illegal activity, I am protecting the m3u as you stated.(lol)

What are you trying to protect them from?
Are they not using secured sockets (https)?
 

Did you really mean you don't want your ISP seeing those streams?
If so a lot of people blow this step using VPNs because they still use their ISP DNS servers.  ISPs don't really look at the traffic too much but do look at DNS lookups since it's easy to get all kinds of stats from them to see what the typical customer is doing.

If you really want to protect yourself from spying eyes, setup encrypted DNS for your LAN and DO NOT use your ISP as the source.  Use 1.1.1.1. or 8.8.8.8. DNS servers which are also really fast. Combine the encrypted DNS not going through your ISP and secured streams and you'll see there is very little need for a VPN at all.  Save the VPN for when it's needed to access a location you can't normally get to.

[bizzs 0]

Thanks Cayars for the response, but I am only a novice user with networking and linux skills.  I am not sure what your telling me to do.  Is there a link that I could read regarding what you just recommended? 

I setup my raspberry pi with emby, changed the port, and forwarded the tvheadend m3u playlist to it. The emby pi is the server now and It works remotely, along with the streams being vpn protected.. This is a temp fix for now until my ipvanish subscription runs out and I can figure out what Cayars told me to do.

Thanks

Lisa