Port forwarding from PIA Canada servers down?

Ozdemon

I haven't been able to obtain a port from Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto for days. It just times out. I couldn't even get France until today. Is there a problem at PIA's end? Using PIA for linux v1.8 on Manjaro.

scripting

I"m also having the same problem since yesterday.

Omnibus_IV

I would recommend opening a ticket from the PIA Support Page.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/helpdesk/new-ticket

PIAMarc

On the evening of March 30, our team became aware of an issue that required the port forwarding feature to be disabled, we are currently working on resolving this. Now, you can use the port forwarding feature from most of our servers. The Canadian servers are still being tested. Rest assured, we are working to restore normal functionality as soon as possible.

If you continue to see this behavior, please use the link Omnibus_IV posted to submit a ticket to our Helpdesk.  If you send a ticket, put, "ATTN:SMR" as the subject.

getsky

Any update on this ?  Still not able to connect to the Port Forward URL from CA-Montreal

Foonus14

This is what I was told yesterday by support.

"Rest assured, we are working to resolve this, but we don't currently have a timetable for the restoration of port-forwarding capabilities on our servers in Canada.  If you want to use the port forwarding feature, you will need to use a different server for the time being"

Leaves PIA subscribers without a single North American host now that supports port forwarding... indefinitely.

I am curious if they understand that this feature is (was) one of the few reasons to chose this VPN in North America.

Wondering if this was a exploit or more likely the reaction of the Canadian ISP's to this virus, coming down hard on them for excessive p2p traffic thus the service blocks our p2p forwarding capability so it won't work.. if its the latter I can't see it being resolved any time soon, if ever.

All of the Canadian servers are owned by the same company so this is quite likely, as i cant see what kind of patch would effect back end hardware differently based on geo location. I was connected to the VPN with port forwarding enabled March 29- April 4'th to Vancouver and it was working all that time until i restarted the router and it tried to lease a new port.  They claim that the change happened on the 30'th so to me the system seems fully capable, it has just been disabled.

Was already some shady stuff going on with these servers in terms of speed, noticed that I could push all the way up to 750Mbit down and 680Mbit up through the VPN on speed test pages, but as soon as it came to speed over any of the ports associated with torrent was only seeing peak UPLOADS of up to 65Mbit with the connection seemingly overloading and dropping/resetting connections on avg as soon as it sustained 50Mbit/second for any lenght of time.  This was not happening with torrent download speed, only upload.  My ISP can't see whats in the encrypted vpn tunnel between me and PIA (thats the point of vpn), so they can't control this, if they were throttling the vpn pipe the speed test wouldn't go that high. That leaves only one other place it could be happening.. the PIA provider, in this case Total Server Solutions L.L.C, which is currently also the same source of this port forwarding issue.

Coincidence? Will leave that up to you to decide.

soschronotek

since this has happened, none of the port forwarding servers have worked for me, although others say they work for them

Foonus14

Right  now the servers below do work, but they are being overwhelmed by every PIA user worldwide that wants to use port forwarding being forced to use them (local users must be thrilled).. it may take you many attempts to lease a port but you should finally get one if you keep trying.

DE Frankfurt, DE Berlin, Czech Republic, Spain, Switzerland,France,Romania,Israel

Problem is that many of these servers were already running at a fraction of the bandwidth to begin with compared to the disabled Canadian servers.  Some are next to unusable right now, coupled with the latency overhead of routeing all the way over there if you are in NA...

Disabled Canadian p2p server bandwidth:

135000 Mbps Toronto +  65000 Mbps Montreal + 46000 Mbps Vancouver

= 246,000Mbps

VS

Rest of world p2p servers bandwidth:

DE Frankfurt 40000
DE Berlin 39000   
Czech Republic 17000
Spain 14000
Switzerland 85000
France 48000
Romania 28000
Israel 8000

= 279,000 Mbps

You can see, in terms of port forwarding the network bandwidth was literally halved overnight, and that does not even reflect the amount of servers available to lease ports from which only further complicates the issue.

soschronotek

yeah sadly cant download anything since this happened

ohaiwill

This is a horrible bug that renders PIA unusable for many users in North America.

Port forwarding using Canadian servers has been sketchy for the last couple months and now it's completely nonexistent.

dolhop

Agreed.  they're no longer offering a key service (port forwarding) that is one of the primary reasons people signed up.  If this isn't fixed VERY soon, it will be time to switch to a new provider.

From a technical standpoint, it seems unlikely that this feature "broke, all of a sudden" - it's been working for many years - they almost certainly just turned it off to reduce traffic.

Foonus14

You will find a low more information at https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivateInternetAccess/ than you will here, especially about the recent ownership change, which may shine some light on this situation.

Personally I believe that as contracts expired with the hosting companies and were renegotiated, the new ownership simply bought a cheaper, more profitable option. Either lesser bandwidth on p2p enabled ports, or simply packages with it completely disabled as many of the other servers already run (including every single one of their new 10).

And again the people take another low blow in the name of corporate greed.

That said, I was able to connect to a Canadian server just 20 minutes ago, and pull a port via curl script, yall might finally be able to leave Germany alone now. This server isn't restarting any time in the near future barring a hardware failure... haha