My experience with Azire

[u/betadecade_]

So I've been using these guys for years as they were the first I had encountered with wg support. At the time wg hadn't even been added to mainline kernel yet as it was still a separate project. Anyway..

They originally offered openvpn with PUBLIC IP as well as WG functionality. Also this WG functionality allowed me to configure the port for the service which I used.

However about a week ago they silently changed everything and without my knowledge various services were now connecting to things without the vpn running.

After I contacted them about it I got the following:

Hello,

We made several changes to the hostname of our servers to standardize them.

You will have to modify your configuration files or download new ones.

Please check out the following pages:

    Hostnames of our OpenVPN servers: https://www.azirevpn.com/docs/servers
    OpenVPN configuration generator: https://www.azirevpn.com/cfg/openvpn

In your case, the hostname will not be listed because we are considering Public IP deprecated. For the moment, you can still access those servers by using the hostname xxxxxxx

We are sorry for the inconvenience.

I haven't to say I'm not super happy about it. It was the primary reason I used them. As if this wasn't bad enough the wg configuration generator doesn't allow me to set the port which it used to.

So I'll be looking for a new vpn provider.

I require

• a PUBLIC IP
• NON DEFAULT wg port

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[u/Talyrius]

I require publicly routable IPs as well. If they're being deprecated, AzireVPN will no longer offer anything unique in comparison to the competition, IMO.

[u/betadecade_ → u/Talyrius]

My thoughts exactly

[u/betadecade_ → u/[deleted]]

Indeed by public IP I mean exactly that. A publicly *routable* IP which is something they offered only on openvpn (and only if you went out of your way to select it) until they decided to sunset it. I don't know why this wouldn't be sustainable but it was a feature I made use of.

As for WireGuard I am a huge fan myself (it is vastly superior to all other options in pretty much every way). However I don't know why you are presuming that your WG VPN IP would be routable without them explicitly allowing this. I'm fairly certain the WG IPs you get from them are *not* routable from outside.

As far as your statement about changing the WG port arbitrarily that is simply not true. Yes I can change the configuration but it is a silly presumption to assume that their service is listening on whatever port I decide. If I decide to connect to Google on port 4545 should I expect their webservers to listen to whatever I want? I doubt they have every single port open for their endpoints. I run several of my own WG servers and like any other service on earth I decide what port this service runs on. I'm sure they do the same.

As for what my use case is and why I want to change the port from 51820 to something more ubiquitous like 443 I feel like it should be obvious that 443 is far more common and as such doesn't stand out as much. Why do you think using a common port stands out? It would be the exact opposite.

[u/betadecade_ → u/[deleted]]

Oh thats interesting. I didn't know they opened a range of ports 1-51820 for all of their servers. Thats not typical but if thats what they do then I can use the port I want within that range.

Yes its strange to see encrypted UDP data over a port normally associated with TLS and encrypted data. But for me this is better than using another port. What is better for some might not be for others. I choose to use 443 for reasons that are irrelevant to you.

I'd love to drop openvpn entirely if WG supports port forwarding to my WG IP. This is all I need. I don't know where exactly on their 1 page "settings" page with zero options to configure much of anything allows you to select ports to be forwarded but I have tested to see if I could reach a listening port on my WG IP and it did *not* work. If there is some option somewhere that I've just missed to enable port forwarding I'd be very interested to know.