IT network bods plz

[Wideboy]

right so I'm downloading a torrent, a legal torrent and I've herd that routers has a built firewall or something that prevent my torrent download client downloading at maximum speed?

is this true if so how do i turn it off? is it safe to turn it off?

i accessed my router through my browser (where you type in you IP and all the settings come up) but don't know what im looking for, i switched off the NAT which caused a whole load of crap and it took me a hour to get back online.

any help much appreciated

cheers

EDIT: my client says that my listen port status is unknown but earlier it was showing as it being firewalled. Is this enything to do with my router?

"Port forwarding" is likely the thing you're looking for. Find out what port your torrent client is using, most likely a high port like 25000+ or something, it'll be in the options settings someplace.

Then on your router you want to set port forwarding such that anything hitting the outside edge of the router on port X gets forwarded direct to your computer (so you'll need to know your internal IP address - go to a DOS box and type "ipconfig /all" - it'll likely be 192.168.X.X, 172.16.X.X or 10.X.X.X

Post up make and model of router and the torrent client you're using and we'll likely dig out more specific instructions.

Oh, and your ISP likely "manages" torrent traffic as well, ie. gives it lower priority than other traffic, some clients allow for encrypted data streams which occasionally helps a little here but in the grand scheme of things there ain't a whole lot you can do about this.

EDIT: Oh, make sure your software firewall (ie. Windows Firewall, or, god forbid, Norton or somesuch) isn't blocking stuff too.

If you're downloading using an 'official' bittorrent client (eg, Azureus), then ignore the blocked port warnings.

The inbound ports are only used in bittorrent networks to allow other peers to connect to the network faster. This does affect your ratio, but only marginally. The ratio is what governs your download speed.

Basically, the tracker will announce you as a peer to any new peers, and they will attempt to connect to you, but may be refused if you block connections. However, the next time you refresh the tracker during the download (done automatically every now & again), you will connect to the peer that you refused previously (so long as your preferences permit the connection).

In short, blocked ports will slow you down, but only until the next time you refresh the tracker details, then it'll be as if you hadn't blocked ports.

Visit www.portforward.com that will explain everything you need to know and in the simplest language possible and they will have a tutorial specific to your routers interface. Fantastic website.

If your not connecting to many peers then you may need to adjust the max number of outbound connections your OS will allow you to connect to. There is a hack created by some guys who run www.lvllord.de that will allow you manually edit your tcpip.sys. I wouldnt bother with this as if you dont know what your doing you can screw it up but if you want to have a go then go for it.

If that's the crack I think it is (the half open connections one) then I'd seriously advise against it to be honest.

Two reasons, first, allowing more half open connections won't increase your speed or the number of peers your connected to, what it will do is increase the speed at which new peers are contacted, ie. it'll ring up more at the same time - the same number of peers will still come back saying "yep, I've got something" or "no I've nothing for you" or just not respond at all. Data isn't transferred across a half open connection, it's merely initial handshaking. Ergo all that happens is that with the patch you can "ring up" peers at a quicker rate, it won't have any impact on the number which answer and want to talk to you.
Second reason is that tcpip.sys is forever getting patched, sometimes for good sometimes for bad, but I'll give Micro$haft the benefit of the doubt and say overall their patching efforts are for the best. Unless you're manually hacking the file then all your doing is replacing your "up to date" stack with a version that was created (last I looked) several years ago.

That said, the reason Msoft gave for the half open connections limit was bizarre at best (something about slowing worm propogation if I remember correct - all it would do is knock tenths of a second off a worm contacting X number of potential new victims).

Originally Posted by MiniMatt

That said, the reason Msoft gave for the half open connections limit was bizarre at best (something about slowing worm propogation if I remember correct - all it would do is knock tenths of a second off a worm contacting X number of potential new victims).

Limiting the number of half open connections has other benefits (that weren't advertised by MS) though as well:
- Less threadlock issues with the core TCP/IP code
- Less resource usage (less threads required to maintain connection status).

About the only real "patch/hack" worth doing for torrents is to change the payload size of each packet. But even that will only give marginal results.

The best thing you can do to improve torrent downloads, is to allow uploads as fast as you can. The throttling for torrents isn't only done in your client.

[Wideboy]

right sorry i havnt read any of the posts yet will dot hat in a sec just wanted to post my router ect

router : belkin wireless G router - 2.4Ghz - 802.11g
client: bitcomet

[Wideboy]

well the thing in the bottom right corner of bitcomet that says "blocked: 86.7... ect" now according to my router status on my browser it is my "wan IP"

so basically my WAN IP is blocked, so how do i go about unblocking that?

I've down the port forwarding thing and it has up'ed my speed from 20KBPS to (at the mo) 70-80KBPS

Hit it with a hammer - everything goes faster if you threaten to hit it with a hammer.

Originally Posted by Wideboy

well the thing in the bottom right corner of bitcomet that says "blocked: 86.7... ect" now according to my router status on my browser it is my "wan IP"

so basically my WAN IP is blocked, so how do i go about unblocking that?

I've down the port forwarding thing and it has up'ed my speed from 20KBPS to (at the mo) 70-80KBPS

The whole message would be helpful. I'm guessing that the message is telling you that inbound connections to your WAN IP are blocked, from another IP. Feel free to blank IP addresses using "a.b.c.d" instead of numbers for security.