mullvad
[Feature Request] Add manual selection of server provider to CLI commands
This would be very useful to have for people like me who struggle with bad ISP routing to some servers. Instead of manually double checking which server belongs to which provider and specifying servers to connect (and servers sometimes go offline) to avoid routing issues, it would be great to have an additional option to specify server provider in addition to country/hostname. For example for multihop purposes it could looks something like this:
mullvad relay set location nl 31173 (exit to a random NL server hosted by 31173)
mullvad relay set tunnel wireguard --entry-location se sto (entry via random SE-STO server)
mullvad relay set hostname se2-wireguard (exit to SE2)
mullvad relay set tunnel wireguard --entry-location nl ams 31173 (entry via random NL-AMS server hosted by 31173)
mullvad relay set provider allows one to specify which provider to use. This will be used to filter both the entry and exit relays.
I saw set provider option but it's not the same thing since, as you said, it applies filters to both entry and exit relays without an ability to separate them, unless I'm misunderstanding it.
Example: I'd like to use any server in Amsterdam hosted by XX as my exit point. But my routing is bad and I can improve it with multihop using any Frankfurt servers hosted by provider YY as my entry point so the route would be fra-YY -> ams-XX.
However Amsterdam and Frankfurt both have servers hosted by XX and YY.
With set provider I have to filter XXYY meaning that I may get random multihops such as fra-XX -> ams-XX or fra-XX -> ams-YY when I need a specific path of fra-YY -> ams-XX.
This brings me back to square one of needing to manually specify each server down to the country and server node, instead of just using the broad "country + server provider" range separately for entry and exit location.
Example is somewhat convoluted but I hope the gist of it is understandable. Having an additional server filter subcommand for separate entry/exit relays would be very handy to have for quick multihop .bat scripts for example.
I understand your use case. It's just that it's a settings combination explosion that we need to think hard about before we implement too much. Except filter by provider we recently also added filter by ownership. And these filters could be applied to WireGuard and to OpenVPN, entry and exit relays plus bridges. Also we use bridges to contact the API, should it be possible to filter those etc?
We need to figure out a way to cleanly make the filters understandable and still satisfying most use cases.
