Anyway, Relakks used to be good, but now it drops out every few minutes and if it does stay connected, it just hangs and no data is transferred. Stay clear, it’s no good anymore

They started out good but are now lousy. You can’t get a hold of them. They don’t respond to support questions and there’s some reports that they block sites that they disagree with. They are big time liberals.

I just switched over to StrongVPN (http://www.strongvpn.com/) and so far it’s a massive improvement. 45 USD for 3 months and no bandwidth limit. It’s based in the US so it might not be as risk free as its Swedish counterpart but I wouldn’t fully trust a UK company either.

Relakks is OK but a bit flakey. Won’t connect to certain websites because the MTU has to be adjusted, but I haven’t been able to figure out where (in the router? in the computer? in azureus? in some combination of the above?). It works fine for torrents, but I can’t surf while that’s going on.

VPNOut works great. And it’s cheap. Only problem: servers are in Florida and I’m in Europe. My bandwidth takes a 50% hit going back and forth. Also, only 15GB/month, which is not much. I used up nearly 4 on the first night.

In the video above Jonas Birgersson, boss of Relakks, talks about everything, almost, that you need to know about Relakks.

Link: http://light.vpod.tv/?s=0.0.201364

A tip; if you’re worried about the account going unprotected, you can simply set up a firewall on the unprotected interface and block the torrent program. I have windows server 2003, with windows firewall on relakks only, and zonealarm on LAN only, and it works great! :)

I subscribed to Relakks (before reading this post) on 11/05 for 1 month service.

I paid for service through PayPal.

I carefully recorded my log on information but Relakks servers give me “user not found” error.

I emailed them twice following the protocol listed in their FAQ.

It’s been 4 days now and I have not heard from Relakks.

As pointed out in this review Relakks’ customer service SUCKS.

Relakks has left me hanging without me knowing anything.

This is a bad thing to do if you are a company looking for repeat business.

Thanks for the review. I will check out the other VPN sites you have mentioned.

-CS

Is this the answer to anonymous bittorrenting? I would be willing to pay $20 in a heart beat if it meant i was actually protected, even if it did mean speed.

Check this out in the Privacy policy:

“If we believe that your use of the service is unlawful or damaging to others, we reserve the right to disclose the information we have obtained through the service about you to the extent that it is reasonably necessary in our opinion to prevent, remedy or take action in relation to such conduct.”

The word Opinion is pretty vague and I dont like that at all.

This almost seems like a media defender trap to me.

Is this service available to the US?

I just dont understand the whole impact this has on our goal of anonymous P2P.

When using tor with PHP, dns resolution leaks can occur as they are generally not proxied. The following two functions can be used to resolve domain names or do a reverse lookup on IP addresses over a socks5 connection.
Tested with php4

function socks…

As an alternative, I looked into MetroPipe who also uses an OpenVPN app. They have live customer service via Skype which is cool for your general questions not related to specific account information.

They have a couple of tiers of service, but in terms of price it’s pretty much $10/month for 3 months (total $30) or $6.50/month for a year (total $79)… oh wait, they only serving up 1 gig per month with their basic package. Never mind.

Luckily I only paid for VPNOut. Their service is spectacular as well. Speeds are fine and it is a stable connection. Since VPNOut is based on bandwidth, I try not to use its bandwidth for anything but torrent traffic. I am using forcebindIP to limit web traffic and traffic from newsleecher to my ‘normal’ IP.

As for Relakks. I paid them for a year via paypal, they activated me, but then I got a notice saying my payment was rejected (and my paypal account was reimbursed). But I still have an active account. I tried emailing support but to no avail.

As for the quality of Relakks. To me it doesn’t compare to VPNOut. Relakks dropped connections a lot and the speeds were nothing to cry over. Best part of it is that it is out of the same country I am in.

No matter how hard you try, thats never going to happen. At least where I live, in the US. All the politicians are working for the media companies – there are bills in congress being voted on right now that would give the government even greater power to imprison copyright violators. It would take billions of dollars and tons of people to overturn copyright laws. Even if the vote was left to the public, I don’t think the laws could be changed. Too many people think copyright is a good idea. Nobody sees the value of eliminating restrictions on information. Everyone sees media as a product. Protection is a “direct action” approach to politics. It’s disobedience.

My connection hasn’t disconnected at all lately but that is because I have learned some tricks that can help with the issue. Read below:

1)Read connection FAQ and make sure you have the right firewall settings.

2)Do not use full download/upload speed with your torrent client. Use about 80% of your connection. I have 8/1m and I upload 80kb/s.

3)PeerGuardian 2 can help since you block most spammers and shit (no unnecessary connections).

When I checked those I haven’t had any connection problems. If I have to criticize something I would also say that their “customer service” is a lot below average. No, I don’t work at Labs2. I just want to say that this service actually works and you should give it a go before you flame it since it’s only 5 lousy euros :)

I use relakks and yes, their customer service is next to non-existent, and yes again, they tend to disconnect randomly.
But first of all they have a low price tag and secondly, they don’t have transfer limits.
If I join a fast swarm, my up/down speed gets to approx. 60% of my lines limit (ADSL+), but usually only swarms on private trackers and newly released tv episodes reach that speed even without relakks. So the speed is not hampered with. To counter the random disconnects, one could run a cronjob to check the status of the connection and reconnect on a split, which I do. Or one could use a torrent client that binds to a specific network interface, like Azureus or the Ktorrent beta for KDE 4. Thus even on a split no data will be sent over the eth0 network interface.
So overall, relakks has some pitfalls, but there are sufficient workarounds.

The main problem is that I am not connectible, if everyone did this nobody would be able to find anyone to download from.

Does PeerGuardian provide much protection?

Stuff that I’m more worried about others keeping an eye on, I run through Relakks. Torrents that I doubt anyone will be watching, I run through the open machine. It’s not a perfect system, but I think it improves the odds in my favor a bit. Relakks works well enough and for a decent enough price to use on a few selected torrents which I can accept getting at a somewhat reduced speed.

Imagine if Oink was not only licensed to sell music but actually had the backing of the worlds record companies and their entire back catalogues. Powered by P2P technology it would be cheap to run and could service millions.

I would pay a good amount per month for a service like that . You could even base it on a credit system where £20/month gets you 1000 credits and then reward those that seed with the ability to earn more.

£140/year is more than i pay for music currently and i think the possibility for a site like this to earn money would be huge. Forget 180 thousand members. Think 180 MILLION!

I dream of the day this becomes a possibility but i think there are too many ego’s and idiots in the record business to go for something like this.

Here in Sweden (Relakks is a swedish service) it seems to work ok for most and they have no dat a limit. So the issue seems to be with International and capped connections.

We use OpenVPN, and basically support any platform this runs on. The reason we stipulate a “windows only” requirement is because the helper application that wraps around OpenVPN is coded for windows :-)

If you can install OpenVPN on your operating system, we can provide a ZIP with all the files needed for you to connect. We’re working on improving this ‘out of band’ support a little, while we try and get a multi-platform client ready – if you raise a ticket, we will answer your question :)

Will using a VPN service really get around this hassle?

I was facing the same disconnect issues, and blaming them for it.

However using another ISP (that doesn’t shape traffic) I was able to connect for over a day, with hundreds of connections, downloading at 6Mbps+

On my old ISP (that shapes P2P) connections would continue to drop.

This, on the exact same hardware and configurations.

So, I believe many of the disconnect issues are really not their fault (not to mention all the other router/setup problems)- but if it doesn’t work for you, there’s not much you can do: either change ISP or VPN service.

They both use OpenVPN. VPNOut supports any configuration on any OS, including your router, as long as it supports OpenVPN. They’ll give you a tar.gz file with your login information if you’re an expert user.

VPNTunnel only supports Windows XP and Vista right now. I asked them about OS X support, and they responded within minutes! They have an OS X client in the works, which should be ready in about two weeks.

VPNOut is considerably cheaper. It’s $20 for 3 months with 15 GB of bandwidth, $60 for 1 year and 200 GB of bandwidth, or $100 for 1 year and 1 TB(!) of bandwidth.

VPNTunnel is ~$20/month (£10/month) for 50GB, which works out to $240/yr and 600 GB.

I can’t vouch for VPNOut’s support, but as long as it works, I’m not sure an extra $140/yr is worth amazing support (not to mention 400 GB less). At least not for me, anyway. If you’re planning on a month-to-month service, though, VPNTunnel is probably the better option.

Thot i was too late to get into
Bittorents so i went with Usenet w
SSL connex. But would still like
to sample and learn about torrents.

Could some1 clue me in – which is
more secure SSL or Tunnels?
Are same thing? Work same way ?

Is there any way to chain the two?
Running Newsleecher thru Giganews SSL server thru VPNTunnel Tunnels
back home?
or likewise – run bittorents
thru two different Tunnels/SSLs ?

Or would 2x cost only provide little
extra security and much slow overhead?

OF course ur paying for 2 services
but increased security , if real,
is worth it if u can afford.

* vpnout on the contrary seems better since at least they document the protocol in their FAQ (And is openvpn)

* For the Relakks thing… yap, week-ends are currently pretty harsh … for Customer support, I just don’t use it :-)…
On the other side, when connected, my linux seems to keep the connection quite well, even with a crazy “no connection limit”… as long as I force pptp/pppd to keep low values for mtu/mru…

For the dropped connection thing, on linux, pptp/pppd can be forced to reopen an infinite number of time the link without actually dropping the interface, this means, in case of a deconnection, that nothing can get out thru another “hole” until a successful reconnection is made… (in short, pppd/pptp will keep to himself the status change of the “relaxed” interface)… and usually, you will keep the same external ip
[cf persist and maxfail] – but okay… this is Linux only stuff… not supported officially by Relakks anyway…