Which Adapter To Bind VPN (PIA)

[MaxArk68]

Hi all, first time poster here and of course it's a desperate call for help, reassurance and/or direction. I'm trying to bing my VPN (PIA) to qBittorrent (QBT) on my Win11 computer. All the Google searches reveal results that are so different than what I am faced with that they really are of no help. I think I may have figured i t out, but I don't want to leave it up to chance and find out after the fact that my assumptions were wrong.

When my VPN is active, QBT provides me this list of network interfaces in the advanced settings tab. To bind, my understanding is I need to select the appropriate adapter for PIA, but it's not obvious as other would suggest - in my opinion.

- Any interface
- Local Area Connection
- Ethernet
- Wifi
- Local Area Connection* 9
- Local Area Connection *10
- BlueTooth Network Connection
- Loopback Pseudo-Interface 1

In the Windows 11 Advanced Network Settings (Network & internet>), Ethernet is enabled (GF31286|Realtek Gaming 2.5gbE Family Controller), WiFi is enabled but not connected, Local Area Connection is enabled (Private Internet Access Network Adapter) as well as Bluetooth Network Connection being enabled. I'm ruling out WiFi and Bluetooth as what I would assume to bind to. I feel confident that Local Area Connection is the obvious adapter I would bind to.

Is this a safe assumption? Would I select "Local Area Connection" from the Network Interface dropdown in QBT? I can change the name of this adapter, but if I do, will it misidentify when not using PIA and cause problems? What are the other Local Area Connections (*) 9 and 10 referring to?

[Entree9544]

None of those are your PIA. You need to have PIA currently connected and then you will see it in the list for qBitttorent. If you are running wireguard it will be named something like wgPIA.

[MaxArk68]

Thank you. I was using OpenVPN protocol. Once switched to WireGuard wgpia0 became an option.

[Peter]

Interesting. OpenVPN should also have it's own interface. Hmm. Maybe they use like a weird library that hides the interface. Glad you got it sorted though!

[Entree9544]

Yes, there should have been an entry for OpenVPN if it was connected before you went into settings in qBittorrent. I just don't remember what its name was as I'm not currently using PIA and when I was I mostly only used wireguard as it was much faster in my testing.