Bittorrent with Irish Broadband: Blocking Ports??

blobert

Hi there,

I've just recently started using Bittorent to download stuff but am having great difficultly getting it to work perfectly. One has to open ports (6881-89 I believe) in order to get it to work fully and achieve the best speeds.

Firstly I disabled by firewall with no results. Then after several tech-support emails to and from Netgear, I seemingly have the ports open on my router but still I don't get the green light from the Bit torrent programs.

I have also checked my ports here: http://www.sayers-design.co.uk/PortScanner-1.aspx and they are all closed.

Netgear (because they have run out of ideas) now reckon it must be my ISP (Irish Broadband) or my modem (Alvarion-BreezeAccess VL) which is blocking the ports. Has anyone else suffered this problem?

I know I've read posts about suspected port blocking by other ISP's in here but I can't find anything about Irish Broadband. I have switched to using "Burst" which has sped things up quite a bit but seeing as I have a rather expensive 1mbs connection, I'd like to get those ports open to speed things up and get value for my €84!

Please let me know if you have any ideas.

Thanks

Moriarty

Easiest way to check if it's IBB or not is to change the port range the BT client uses. If the problems persist, it's not IBB causing it.

Ripwave

Moriarty wrote:

Easiest way to check if it's IBB or not is to change the port range the BT client uses. If the problems persist, it's not IBB causing it.

The easiest way to check if it's IBB is to plug your PC directly into the IBB connection, and take your router completely out of the loop.

(Whether that's a good idea or not is a seperate question, but I wouldn't have any problem doing it on a temporary basis while figuring out what the problem was, as long as I had an up to date Anti-Virus application installed).

SlayerIRL

Hi. Try these 2 torrents in the first post in this thread. Connection Checker They will check your connection and should tell you in more detail where the problem lies, also if you're not using bittornado already I'd recommend it over the original client. BitTornado

Kevok

The definitive way to check, is to download azureus and use the single port downloading. It allows you to specify the port to use (something obscure like 11245 or something), if you get full speeds then they are blocking ports.

Another thing to look for would be whether it's actually set up properly, you know this if you get a green light (or green smily face), if it's yellow all the time then you need to forward the port you are using, there are faqs all over the net to help you with this.

CyberGhost

it's prolly your router, I had the same problem until I redirected my ports!

please tell us your results!

statto

I have had similar problems with IBB before. I changed the default port numbers on the bit torrent apps and that solved the problem. There has been a lot of discussion regarding IBB and whether they block ports or not. I do believe the do perform some sort of traffic management.

gsand

Just put your router on DMZ-then all ports are open...

Then you'll know if the router is responsible...

I myself have experienced something which also looks like port traffic shaping. Either that or extremely poor average speeds...