How to Set up Portforwarding & Static IP Reply thread.

[kluelos]

Mayur, all of this configuration is mostly to make sure you aren't slowing yourself down. The big factors in download speed are beyond your control, having to do with the composition and characteristics of the rest of the swarm. Each torrent is different, and if the swarm is small, the speed is probably going to be slow.

[mayur553]

hey kluelos... thanks for replyin.... can u pls tell me how do i increse the speed.... it depends upon the torrent site right.... so pls tell me which is the best torrnet site from where i can get good speed...

[kluelos]

No, it's not the torrent "site". Bittorrent doesn't work that way at all. It's nothing like anything else you've used, completely different technology. There are no "sites" involved.

Everything you download gets uploaded by somebody else just like you, with a computer like yours and a connection like yours. It's "Peer-to-Peer", so you connect to all those other people, and you all swap data among yourselves. When you start a torrent, you download a few pieces of it, then you upload those pieces to other people, while you're downloading more yourself. Everyone is uploading and downloading at the same time.

The clients are "greedy", and try to make the best connections they can - the fastest, most reliable connections. It's a trade. To get the best and fastest and most reliable connections, you have to be, yourself, a fast and reliable connection - else they won't trade with you, will connect to somebody else instead, trade with them instead. You'll have to pick among the leftovers, the less speedy, less reliable.

You really do have to give in order to get. If you clamp things down so that your client does not upload at all, then nobody will give you much either, and your download is going to be excruciatingly slow if it finishes at all.

So what you do to increase your speed is to become the most attractive trade partner out there. Make sure you're offering a clean and fast connection. As a rule, make sure that every torrent is getting an upload bandwidth as high as possible, at least a third of your measured upstream capacity (don't take your ISP's word for it) and never less than 8 KB/s. If you fall below that you're running too many tasks at once.

But you need to understand that none of this is going through or depends upon a site somewhere out there. It's all direct, your client to my client, your client to Joe's client, Joe's client to yours, a whole bunch of individual connections from one peer to another. "Swarm" is an abstraction that means all of these individual connections taken together. It's just a rhetorical device and doesn't actually exist as something anyone can point to. Kinda like "public opinion".

The tracker just keeps a list of who's in the swarm, and we check with it every 20 minutes or so to update that list. Apart from that, there's no central site involved. And with features like DHT, there's not even a tracker.

[kakashicero]

but can i change my Static IP next time?

[kluelos]

The static IP affects only the LAN. It's just between your router and your PC, not the internet. It doesn't affect your internet connection at all, only the connection to your router. So, yes, you can change the address as often as you like, provided you change the router's firewall setting to reflect that change too.

[donwallie]

i tried the port forwording,and it didnt work for me,i did everything right,i ecided to call my isp only to be told that i cant set up a ststic ip address they have set it from there office and i have to sign up for it.

is there any help for me,my isp is CWJ

Ques is the ip address the dns server address,which is 192.168.1.1

[kluelos]

donwallie, see the post immediately above yours.

[dandelion]

I have a question here: the static ip we are trying to set is a different one than the one we found in the MS DOS? Cos I read in PortForward about setting a static ip and it used this format:

Enter your computer's default gateway:

Enter your computer's current IP Address:

Those two are from ipconfig, right? Cos that's what the guide told us to do: enter the numbers like the ones in Ipconfig.

Then, it generated some IP to be used....

First Computer's Static IP:

Second Computer's Static IP:

Third Computer's Static IP:

Forth Computer's Static IP:

Fifth Computer's Static IP:

at this part, it confused me a lot. Hope you can help out.

I'm using an Aztech modem and all this while, my Lan Ip has always been the same, so I'm not sure if the static IP is the problem, or is it? How about WAN? This changes all the time right? I found out that my WAn is the same as the IP that is blocked in BitComet at the lower right corner.

Thanks.

[kluelos]

Just ignore all of it. You can either attempt to understand, to comprehend what you're doing; or you can blindly follow procedure hoping that it's correct but unable to detect when you've gone off the rails.

IPCONFIG is going to tell you what the status of your network cards is. It knows about those cards and a limited amount about whatever they're connected directly to. Its knowledge stops there. If you connect directly to your ISP, then that limited knowledge with be about the ISP. But if you connect to a router, then the limited knowledge will be about the ROUTER, not the ISP anymore.

A gateway is just where a connection is supposed to try if the destination can't be found on the local network. Most times, most people don't HAVE a local network at all. For most people there is only one possible gateway, which is the router. (The same is true for your DNS server: only thing you're connected to: the router.)

When you connect a computer to a router, you've created a LAN. The router can interconnect two different networks. It is, indeed, a gateway between them. That being so, it has an "identity", an address, on both networks. The address on each network is different from its address on the other network.

The router has a LAN-side address, which is used by anything connected to that side of it that wants to talk to the router. (This is incidentally how the router is managed and configured. Most consumer routers now have a little web server built in to them, so they have a control interface that can be accessed with a web browser simply by visiting their LAN address with an HTTP request. Other and older routers have a telnet server instead, and a command-line interface.)

The router also has a WAN side address. For most people, their WAN is the internet. Before you bought the router, you connected your computer directly to your ISP (via a modem). Now, you connect the router directly to your ISP instead, and the router is in the spot where your computer used to be. It replaces your computer and it performs the same functions your computer performed when interfacing with the ISP.

You used to get an IP address from the ISP. But it's your router that does that now. Now the router has the IP address that you used to have, used to get from your provider. This is the internet address that the world sees.

Any request you send out goes from the computer to the router. There, the router sends it out to the internet using the router's address, not the computer's, as the reply address. This is necessary because only the router can actually communicate with the computer. Nobody out on the internet can communicate directly with the computer anymore, they have to go through the router. The router is all they can "see", so it's a black box to them. They don't know if there's just one computer connected to the LAN side of that router, or hundreds, maybe thousands of different computers and terminals and mainframes. All they can see and deal with is the router.

Replies come back to the router, which sends those replies to the particular device that requested them. It "routes" the information to the right place, which is why it's called a router, and which is what its purpose is.

All of this routing happens on the LAN side. On the LAN side, the router has a default built-in IP address. This can be changed on some routers, but rarely needs to be.

There is a block of IP addresses that is reserved for subnets (LAN's) like this one. That block is 192.168.xxx.xxx and nobody's allowed to use addresses in that block, out on the internet. Routers are supposed to refuse to attempt to route those addresses on the WAN side. There's another block, for larger subnets, at 10.xxx.xxx.xxx that's also reserved and invalid on the internet. (Corollary, if you have an IP address in either block, you know you have to be behind a router.)

The router is usually assigned an arbitrary, but low address within that block. Let's say that one router has been hard-coded with the address 192.168.2.1, as many are. The third octet is "2", but it could be "1" or "0" just as well, and it would make no difference to the validity if it were. But whoever wrote the firmware decided to use 2.

Then there's a "netmask" which determines what will be routed. It is "255.255.255.0", and that means that the first three octets of any address have to match the router's, while the fourth octet can be "any". (In this context, only the numbers 0 through 255 are valid.) So all device addresses on this LAN have to begin with 192.168.2 but can have 0 through 255 inclusive as their final octet.

Each device's IP address on a network must be unique. Now out of that 0-255 block, the router already took "1" so we can't use that for anything else. The router could have taken "0", and it would actually make more sense that way, but using zero seems to make people nervous so most routers don't. But that still leaves us with 2 through 255, and that is far more addresses than most people will ever need.

We can use any/all of those addresses. There is no difference to them and no advantage to using one over another. We just have to make sure that no two devices have the same address.

Before we had a router, the computer connected directly to the ISP. In those days, the computer asked the ISP to temporarily loan it an IP address. This was accomplished by a protocol called DHCP. Now, the router uses DHCP to ask the ISP for its WAN side address just as the computer used to.

Windows computers default to using DHCP to ask whatever network they're connected to, for an IP address. This also works for the router, which will accept that request from the computer, and assign to the computer an IP address on the LAN, in that group of addresses limited by its own address and the netmask.

The router takes a subset of that group of addresses and holds them in a DHCP pool, to be assigned to any device that connects and asks for an address. You can control this pool through the router interface. The pool usually has a start (or lowest) address, and then either an end (highest) address or a range. So we can define the lowest address in the pool as the first available address, 192.168.2.2, and the highest as just a little above that, say 192.168.2.5 which would give us 2.3.4 and 5, a total of four IP addresses that could be assigned to any computer which connects and asks for an IP address.

We may have other computers in the house that connect to the router, but that we're not trying to configure for P2P, so they can continue to connect the way they always have, by DHCP and using one off those addresses in the pool. We may have a laptop that we carry around. We connect it to different networks, say at work or at the coffee shop or on campus, and when we connect it to each one of those networks, it uses DHCP to ask for an IP address on that network. Then when we bring it home it uses DHCP to ask for an address from our router. So this, too, would be one of the addresses in that DHCP pool. If we have friends who drop by and bring their laptops, and occaasionally wish to use our internet connection, they too will get an address out of that pool. We can make the pool whatever size we want, but judge that having four assignable addresses is going to be enough.

That leaves all of the addresses from 6 through 255 still available. You can manually assign them, however that's done for each device, to any other devices you want to connect to the LAN. Usually, all you want to connect is your one computer. So pick an address in that block, and tell your computer's network settings to use that address.

Be dull, use the first available one, which is 6: so 192.168.2.6 would be your static IP. Or use the last one, so 192.168.2.255 or just pick one arbitrarily in order to be different: 192.168.2.42

It makes no difference at all which one you use. No one of them is in any way preferable or "better" than any other. We just chose an IP that was not in the DHCP pool in order to eliminate any possibility that this address might be given to some other device on the network.

So your software that tells you what those static IP's for various computers are, is just a simplistic version of this.

[dandelion]

Ok....i got about half of what you talked about...lemme run this through again to see if really understood you:

From IPCONFIG,

IP: 10.0.x.x

Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0

Default gateway. 10.0.b.b

DNS: 10.0.b.b

I only connect one computer at a time to my router.

So, for setting up my static IP, I can use an IP of 10.0.x.9 for example?

I understand that WAN is the internet side, but that's the add. that others see, not the LAN. So, when we use whatsmyip, it would give us the IP of WAN right? Because that's what happened to me. Thanks.

I couldn't get it why my laptop doesn't get remote as seeing my previous desktop had the yellow light but still had remote connections. The router gave it a different LAN IP, which I can understand. However,I might be doing something wrong here, I opened port 10000 for both LAN addresses. Is that my mistake? But, i only connect one computer at a time, so I didn't think that it would affect anything.

Thanks again.

[kluelos]

Whatsmyip gives you the router's WAN ip, correct.

If your system's properly set up and working, then the default gateway and primary DNS server will normally be the router. If you're using DHCP on the computer's network settings, then it will be.

You can use that 10.10.b.9, but it might still be in the router's pool, so the router MIGHT have already assigned it away. But if and only if you don't ever connect another device to your router, you won't have to worry about this.

If your router's address is

10.10.2.1

and your netmask is

255.255.255.0

Then all of the addresses on your lan have to be

10.10.2.x

So 10.10.2.9 will work and so will 10.10.2.40. But 10.10.3.40 will not because the third octet is different, 3 instead of 2. The 255 in the netmask in that third position means the third octets must match exactly. The 0 in the netmask in the fourth octet position means that the fourth octet can be any value (that's in the permissible range of an octet).

The combination of IP + Port is unique, so two computers on the same router can use the same port number. I just don't recommend it because it causes confusion. (But if those two computers have the same IP address, nothing at all will work right, and listen port numbers are the least of your troubles.)

Now, if you swear on the lives of your cats that you won't ever hook both computers to the router at the same time, then there's no reason they can't use the identical static IP and listen port numbers.

If you take that laptop elsewhere and connect it to other networks, you're probably going to have to be constantly rejiggering your network settings, so it will behoove you to memorize the right ones for home.

[dandelion]

Hmmm.....well, it's weird then why i can't get that annoying green light. i don't really mind it there cos previously, I get it too but I still had remote connections. I'll give uninstalling a try and also setting the static IP again. Just puzzled why the desktop and laptop differs when using BitComet when I have exactly the same programs, ie, antivirus and all.

My router only takes two computers, so they have the constant Ip, my laptop being 10.0.0.4 and desktop 10.0.0.7 everytime I checked, so static IP is done correctly?

Regarding firewalls, will only antivirus have them? I have one spyware exterminator program and i really doubt it blocks BitComet. Previously, I had Symanytec installed in my laptop but I had uninstalled it and used AVG antivirus instead.

Thanks for your help. Understood why my IP in BitComet was different now.

and also, I just checked my summary in BitComet and this is what it said:

Listen Port of TCP: 10000

Listen Port of UDP: 10000

Windows Firewall: Added

NAT port mapping: Disabled

Now, is my firewall supposed to be there? I had it on exceptions already. And NAT port mapping?

Oh yes, BitComet keep giving me tips on increasing my half open TCP. Is that advisable? It's currently set at 10 now.

[kluelos]

Ignore the TCP limit, it's a mistake based on a misunderstanding, and however you configure it, it won't make a significant difference.

Most purely antivirus products do not include a firewall. But most "security" products DO, and even some mainboard software from Nvidia includes one. It's really up to you to make sure you aren't running other firewalls. BitComet won't tell you which firewall is blocking the port, only that it's blocked. So if one computer shows it open and the other computer, with the same IP, hooked to the same place, shows it closed, then the second one's got a software firewall you don't know about. (So many assumptions in that sentence!)

The Windows firewall does no harm, and BitComet will use ICF to configure it properly automatically, but it won't do that for any other software firewall. (And, you know, I don't WANT other software configuring my firewall. If an app can do it, so can a trojan.) NAT is a poor second choice when you don't have an open listen port.

[piotras]

Hi, guys. I've almost done everything concerning the portforwarding (guide from this page), I've chose a port 50000+ etc., the port is OPENED when I check it with this: https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2, all I need to do is:

We will list a series of lines here that will show you exactly how to forward the ports you need to forward. BitComet requires you to forward the ports you entered above. Go ahead and enter the settings shown above into the NAT Rule - Add menu and then click Submit.

And that is it! You are done!

The problem is that I don't see any "series of lines" nor I don't have an idea where is the "NAT Rule - Add menu" .... i guess it's somewhere in my router settings where I was setting firewall rules etc. but I can't find it...

is there an error on the page or sth?

I think that this step is crucial, since my D/L went down from a healthy 35-85 to 2 ;/

I've uploded a print screen with the web-page just in case.

EDIT:

strange thin happens: when i check whether my port (55000) is open or not i differs depending if bitcomet is on or off, when bitcomet is running the port is OPEN, when bitcomet is shut down, the port is closed...

[kluelos]

The usual situation is that the portforward site asks you several questions, but you don't answer them. Then you look for the list of lines, and you don't see it because it's not there. It's not there because you ignored the questions it asked instead of answering them.

Portforward.com is a supplement to, and absolutely not a replacement for, reading and understanding the manual that came with your router. You need to read and understand that manual. If you still don't get it, Portforward will provide some useful tips.

But if you treat portforward.com as a series of steps to blindly follow without ever having to think or understand, then you have to follow the steps. It says "do A", then you have to do A, not just shrug it off and still expect it to work. It won't.

BitComet will use ICF to open and close your XP firewall as it needs. It opens the port when it's running, and closes it when it quits. This is not odd behaviour, it's the correct and expected behaviour.

[piotras]

The usual situation is that the portforward site asks you several questions, but you don't answer them. Then you look for the list of lines, and you don't see it because it's not there. It's not there because you ignored the questions it asked instead of answering them.

I'm afraid you're wrong. All that portforward site have asked me is to a ) "BitComet's Listen Port: <port number>" and b ) "Please enter the static ip you want to forward to:

192.168.0.<number>"

I gave answers for both of those questions - for the second one I don't know if I've done it properly - the guide written for BitComet tells me to "When you come to the step where it states "Please enter the static ip you want to forward to:" And it's 192.168.2.[space here] 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" and portforwarding wants me to: "To setup port forwarding on this router your computer needs to have a static ip address. Take a look at our Static IP Address guide to setup a static ip address. When you are finished setting up a static ip address, please come back to this page and enter the ip address you setup in the Static IP Address box below." It's a bit confusing, since in the end both guides ask me to put 2 different digits in that space ("2" in the BitComet version and "36" or "37" or "38" or "39" or "40" in portforwarding version), but I decided to stick to BitComets guidelines which I was following from the start.

Portforward.com is a supplement to, and absolutely not a replacement for, reading and understanding the manual that came with your router. You need to read and understand that manual. If you still don't get it, Portforward will provide some useful tips.

But if you treat portforward.com as a series of steps to blindly follow without ever having to think or understand, then you have to follow the steps. It says "do A", then you have to do A, not just shrug it off and still expect it to work. It won't.

I'm not doing any portforwarding for the pleasure of sitting in front of a screen for an half an hour longer a day. All I wanted to do was to configure BitComet to do its best, that's why I followed the guide(s). I am not an IT engineer as everyone probably realised, that's why I don't know what I'm exactly doing, why am I doing it and\or what are the alternative (or main) ways of doing this. That's why I've posted those questions and I would like to point out the fact (again) that I DID follow the steps (or as you call it: "I did A, B, C and even D"). If the guide would say "look into your router manual" I would do that, even though I didn't realised that configuration of BitComet has anything to do with my routers manual (which unfortunately I do not have, since when I moved to my flat the router was there and the manual wasn't).

BitComet will use ICF to open and close your XP firewall as it needs. It opens the port when it's running, and closes it when it quits. This is not odd behaviour, it's the correct and expected behaviour.

Thank you for explaining that, I didn't know.

Could I please ask someone competent to have a look at my problem individually and don't treat me as an another "guy-who-doesn't-do-what-he's-told-and-keeps-on-complaining-why-everything-doesn't-work"? I would me most grateful for any help.

[dandelion]

Hey there, I just got back my desktop (that's why I had to use my laptop) and weirdly, the port is open, so I guess it's something blocking in my laptop, will run task manager to search every single thing going on as you suggested once somewhere in the your posts. :)

Got more questions here: when i'm using BitCOmet 0.93, i see persistent seeders. Only later versions can see these is it? Cos when I used BitComet 0.89. i never see "persistent seeders". Also, my connections now, with the port open and both remote and local initiations actually have slower speeds compared when I had only local connections( when the port was blocked and I used version 0.93). Newer versions just have new additional features and not necessarily increase dl speeds, do they?

Thanks a lot for your help.

[kluelos]

Piotras, you seen quite resistant to the idea that you need to understand what you're doing and why you're doing it that way. If you don't have your router's manual, then you can and should look it up online. Google will probably turn up a downloadable or at least readable copy of it for you.

But this post :http://forums.bitcomet.com/index.php?showtopic=236&st=285

will give you the wherefore and why. As will some others in this same thread. It explains in detail what digits you need to put where, and why, and what they do. This is not black magic, and it's not impossibly technical or arcane. In fact it's a little simple-minded, which is generally true of most things on the internet. They're bloody simple, and a little stupid, actually, when you get down to how they work. This stupidity is largely the reason we can't seem to solve the email spam problem. Almost all internet systems were the result of not-terribly-insightful engineers doing the simplest thing that could possibly work.

It's dead simple if you just don't let it intimidate you. (Then you'll snort with disgust and wonder if they couldn't have thought of something better than THAT!)

The portforward guides were written with the firmware revisions and manuals that the authors had access to at the time they were written. These are subject to change and not guaranteed to be correct. But for anyone who's willing to make the effort to understand what they're doing, that won't matter. They've done an awful lot of hand-holding already.

[kluelos]

The whole "persistent seeders" idea is a lot more popular in SE Asia than it is in the rest of the world, and you're correct, earlier versions of BitComet don't support it.

There have been no significant changes to Bittorrent generally for a good while now, and version 0.70 incorporates all of them in addition to being the most stable version. Some of the subsequent versions seem to be problematic, and I'm seeing a lot of flakiness reported with 0.93. But none of the changes are going to increase your download speed.

[dandelion]

Oh no, that green light was just a fluke of luck. I got yellow again today. Ah...you said that sometimes it happens right? When, out of sheer luck, the IP matches or something... But I get this quite a few times though. Just weird. Any ideas why this is happening? Thanks...

[frazzles84]

Can anyone help!!!!

I have followed the thread and get to 4. entering IP address etc.

When i do this for some reason my internet STOPS working so obviously cant move on to step 5.

Any one any idea???

Thanks

[kluelos]

Yes, it happens if you did not tell your computer (in your network settings) to use a specific and unchanging IP address, that matches the address you told your router to open the port to.

You left the network setting on "Use DHCP...", so you get a different IP address every session.

Oh no, that green light was just a fluke of luck. I got yellow again today. Ah...you said that sometimes it happens right? When, out of sheer luck, the IP matches or something... But I get this quite a few times though. Just weird. Any ideas why this is happening? Thanks...

[rufuslawrence]

Hi guys!

Great guide thanks! unfortunately still having issues. I have checked and rechecked and everything is set up as it should be. Mcaffee has exception for the port im using, so does windows security centre and my Netgear DG834GT (from sky) in both inbound and outbound servies. My upload download was tested at 2.77mb/890kb (not exact) but when probing the port im using it appears as stealth and replies to ping!

in Bitcomet i get the dreaded yellow light ... Blocked

Any ideas?

Thanks

Rufus

[kluelos]

I don't know what you mean by "from sky", but try getting the router out of the loop and connecting directly. If you now get a green light, you'll know the router is still not configured correctly. If it doesn't, you know you have further problems, likely a firewall you don't know about.

[qwiqwi]

Hello, I am using BitComet0.93 and I have a Modem and a router (WBR-1310) for my computer (vista), the cable comes into the modem and the modem connects to the router then to my computer. When I tried to forward my port using the instruction in this forum and type the cmd, ipconfig/all it shows a lot of things that are different from the instruction so I don't know what to do, can anyone teach me how to set up? Thanks.