Port forwarding done, but listen port still yellow

[Dioscuri]

Hi all. My downloads were quite normal until a few days ago when I realised that my listening port has now turned yellow.

I'm running windows xp, using Bitcomet 1.03. My router/ modem is 2wire 2701HGV-E. I switched off windows firewall to test if the port will turn green but it did not. Other than that the only other firewall I have is the zonealarm free version, which I've already indicated bitcomet to be trusted server.

I tried to do nat port mapping following the instructions here and everything seemed according to what was written until I reached step 3 of manual NAT mapping. No ballon message appeared and no "internet gateway device" appeared.

Below is the info taken from my bitcomet. Not sure if it's ok to post the full IP here so I've substituted the last 2 numbers with XX. Please let me know if it's needed to solve the problem and I'll repost it again.

Overall Tasks: Total:1 / Running: 1

TCP Connections: Established: 12 [MAX:Unlimited] / Half-Open: 2 [MAX:10]

LAN IP: 192.168.1.XX

WAN IP: 116.14.253.XX

Listen Port of TCP: 11508

Listen Port of UDP: 11508

Windows Firewall: Added [TCP opened, UDP opened]

NAT port mapping: Failed [uPNP device not found!]

Overall Download Rate: 1 kB/s Max Connection Limits: 50 per task

Overall Upload Rate: 14 kB/s, including LT seeding: 0 kB/s Upload slots: 7

Disk Cache Size: 10 MB (Min: 6 MB, Max: 50 MB)

Free Phys Mem: 256.67 MB (Min: 50 MB)

Disk Read Statistics: Request: 686127 (freq: 1.0/s), Actual Disk Read: 33563 (freq: 0.1/s), Hit Ratio: 95.1%

Disk Write Statistics: Request: 198835 (freq: 0.0/s), Actual Disk Write: 8509 (freq: 0.0/s), Hit Ratio: 95.7%

Total Downloaded: 4.14 GB

Total Uploaded: 13.25 GB

I need to add that I'm not exactly familiar with networking/ technical terms so please bear with me if I don't seem to understand your advice.

Thanks in advance!

[kluelos]

look in the guides forum,here. This is discussed at length and many, many questions asked and answered.

ZA is much despised as a firewall and is discommended. If, for some reason, you feel that you just absolutely MUST have a third-party firewall, then at least choose a product that is better behaved.

[greywizard]

I must add that the link to the guide you gave points to the UPnP port mapping.

While that's easier to configure, when UPnP doesn't quite work it's very hard to troubleshoot. It kind of seems that this might be the cause of your issue in the first place.

You should disable entirely UPnP in the router (and Windows) and go for the second part of the guide which deals with manual port-forwarding.

[Dioscuri]

Thanks for the reply.

I disabled zonealarm and windows firewall (the only firewalls I know that are installed in the PC), and followed the port forwarding instructions again but to no avail.

The funny thing is, I port forwarded quite some time ago when I changed the modem and all was going well until recently when I realised that the download has slowed to a crawl, sometimes not moving at all and that's when I noticed the yellow light is on. Is it possible for something to have changed even tho I did not touch the settings of my modem and BC all these while?

to add on:

I followed the instructions here until I reached this part -

Next, Head to www.portforward.com - BitComet section and locate your router's model/brand and follow the instructions on-screen.

When you come to the step where it states "Please enter the static IP you want to forward to:" And it's 192.168.x.[ ] Input the last digit of your IP address into the space. The Static IP is the same IP Address as the one you saw in MS-DOS when you typed: ipconfig/all.

But when I was following the instructions in portforward.com for my router model, I can't find the step that says "Please enter the static IP you want to forward to:"

Edited March 25, 2010 by Dioscuri (see edit history)

[greywizard]

The funny thing about ZA firewall is that it is reported to still work even when disabled. That is, some resident modules still keep running and meddling with your connections, therefore for the purpose of this test you should entirely uninstall the thing if you want to be on the safe side.

You'll be fine with the firewall in your router, anyway.

Now about the guide.

First I want to mention that you should make sure that you have added definitions for both TCP and UDP protocols on your router firewall as from what I see you can't create in one step one rule for both of them, therefore you'll need to create 2 rules; one for each protocol under the umbrella of the BitComet user-defined application (or whatever other name you named it).

The reason why you can't see the step from the guide you mention in your post above is that it doesn't exist, in your case. It is replaced by the step where you have to choose a computer from the drop-down list, on the firewall settings page, in step 1.

Your router (and many other models lately) use the NetBios name of the computer (the name it has on your internal LAN) instead of its IP. This alternative emerged as a means to avoid having to set a static IP, in case of port forwarding.

Since the router uses the NetBios name, you'll be able to let your PC get its IP from the DHCP server on your router (as it does by default) and still have the ports you want forwarded to your PC, because the router dynamically queries and matches the temporary IP assigned by DHCP, to your computer's NetBios name (the one you choose from the drop-down box).

I'll update the Wiki guide with this info, so that this thing be clearer for future readers.