I will admit it freely, I am lazy and having offloaded most of the services and systems that we used to run am really not inclined to do anything I don’t absolutely have to. I am sure I will be called out, so figured I should lead with this.
VPNs. They are great, they are useful… but why oh dear why are they so dead set on trying to anonymise ‘everything’? Sorry, I forgot to sell secrets to the Talliban, guess I don’t really care that you are keeping logs. You know when I do care? When I use a VPN to simulate traffic from another host on a system with a LOT of traffic coming in, fail to take note of the IP the VPN service threw at me, then have to try to guess which of too many entries was me. Just an absolute…
So obviously, the simple answer is forget public services, simply host your own. Brilliant, and I agree. I also refer you to the first entry here, and cordially invite you to get stuffed 
It is well after midnight, I have been self-medicating (Guiness is medicine, this is a hill I will die on) and I have run out patience. Hopefully one of you will have a direction to point me in. Otherwise, I may have to actually bloody do my job and administer a system which really would do a number on that whole ‘lazy’ thing. 15 minutes of “work” vs wasting hours just seems too much effort.
What’s your actual question?
fail to take note of the IP the VPN service threw at me, then have to try to guess which of too many entries was me.
Cant you just whatsmyip from the client?
Just don’t look at the logs, then you won’t have to guess any IPs, etc.
Well to be fair, I was told that there is a law in the United States that they must have logs. So I don’t think any VPN with servers in the United States is completely anonymous in terms of still being able to be inquired of by the government.
I would think that the best way to avoid this is to get your own server rack space somewhere outside of the United States and use it for a secure shell VPN. I could be wrong
So let me get this straight. You post to Reddit drunk, then the next day, instead of deleting the post, you follow up with multiple apologies for posting drunk. Good thing Reddit allows us to block all future posts from a particular user.
Not after you disconnect. If you neglect to grab the details, it is too late.
Apologies, it was a late night, after a week getting less than two hours rest a day and my brain was fried. Still is.
Sorry, I was really not making sense.
I need to troubleshoot access issues to a service. For this, I need logs, and I need to be able to determine which traffic is which. Hard to identify what is what when I was too exhausted to think to check details before disconnection.
Sorry, I was completely shattered and clearly almost incoherent. Probably should have called out for a month.
I specifically do not want secure or anonymous. I want an absolutely obvious path that I can pull logs from later when needed.
Still, running your own solution seems to be the best option. Doesn’t seem to be much demand for a non-“anonymous” service.
Better to own the stupidity I thought.
Curious what solution you are using. I can’t think of any VPN solution where you can’t search logs by username, etc. I’ve never needed a user to check their IP. Are you using some Chinese Anonymous VPN solution?
