The original post: /r/homelab by /u/ChargeThis on 2025-03-11 20:06:28.

BLUF: looking for some help with qbittorrent connecting out over a vpn in docker. Exhausted my troubleshooting efforts.

I’ve been running this for a long time, never had any issues. That changed over the weekend, which coincided with my update to pihole v6. After that broke everything, I ended up on their site to find it was a major overhaul with “breaking changes”. Lesson learned. I’m not even sure this is related, but after reinstalling it twice, trying it in docker, and then going back to bare metal, I noticed that qBittorrent is no longer connecting out.

It shouldn’t be related from my understanding, and yet here I am wondering if it was a pihole dependency that I’m now missing or something.

I’ll include my docker compose below. Side note: my docker management is primarily through Portainer, in case that’s relevant (I’m not ruling anything out at this point!)

What I’m seeing:

  • I can log into the qB web gui
  • Arr stack can communicate with qB, including adding magnet links
  • Not seeing any seeds or peers, stuck at "downloading metadata
  • Logs via Portainer show no errors (“Connected!” in NordLynx, “Connection to locahost succeeded” in qB)
  • It’s not the vpn (NordLynx) because Prowlarr has no issues going through the vpn

The only indication anything is wrong is that it can’t find peers or seeds, and thus can’t download. Only times I’ve seen this before was when the NordLynx container takes too long to load/connect, but restarting qB resolved that easily.

Troubleshooting done so far:

  • Multiple, multiple, multiple restarts of all containers involved
  • Verified all ports are accurate
  • Rolled back multiple versions of qB and NordLynx
  • Refreshed Nord private key
  • Switched from NordLynx to NordVPN containers (and back again)
  • Switched from qB to Deluge (and back again)
  • Reinstalled pihole, multiple times
  • Switched pihole from bare metal to docker container
  • Rolled pihole (docker) back to v5.x
  • Lots of reboots

What am I missing?! Any help is greatly appreciated.