Download speeds - Wireless

[NickinOz]

Windows XP SP2

Bit Comet .70

AMD 2400

1 gig RAM

Zywall 2WE

Wireless broadband connection 1000k/200k (tests about 900-980)

Windows Firewall (exceptions allowed)

....yup, been reading the posts since 6 this morning ...

Just prior to writing this I was getting 22kB/s download and then back to 2-4. Previous top speeds have been only as high as 30 or so, but in the main below 10.

Peers (for this download) lists all local (although it has listed remotes) in the past on a previous download.

At present I have not forwarded any ports (or have tried and failed - Bit Comet stopped downloading).

I abandoned another client because of the speed issue and like BC as an overall tool, but need some help to get things up to speed.

My next step after this is to attempt portforwarding again, but I fear the problem may lie behind my LAN or with my ISP....

Trust this is enough information for some general guidance or perhaps something more specific.

and thanks to moderators and staff who work on forums like this .....

[The UnUsual Suspect]

Hi,

It is very pleasant to see a member actually read what we take our time to post :)

I can tell you that your going in the correct direction with forwarding your listening port.

Besure to select a port in the 50000-60000 range, and you will also need to set a static IP address for all the computers that share your router as well.

Portforward.com has very good guides for forwarding ports in most routers, as well as setting the static IP address in windows. I've also posted a guide for static IP in our forum.

When your done, you can check your port at "canyouseeme.org". Anything other then "open" means something isn't setup right.

Suspect

[NickinOz]

...well, went through the portforwarding from Portforward.com...(this worked great on an adsl line and a billion router a year ago! but I moved house!)

canyouseeme.org shows a different ip address and displays an error ... (using port 50000) it shows a 203 range ip while the local network is 10 and it was this IP I set in properites for the PC ...

Confused? You bet and to make it worse I have to go to work!!!

Thanks for your prompt reply ... any suggestions..... 'fraid late nite telly is off until I get this sorted!!

[The UnUsual Suspect]

your internal (lan) IP address is different then your External internet IP address.

This is normal. Your internal should be 192.168.xxx.xxx

this link will tell you what your external IP address is.

http://www.whatismyipaddress.com/

The reason you need to set a static IP address in windows (internal lan IP) is so the router knows which computer the port gets sent to. The only way the router can find your computer is by the IP.

I hope this make it easier for you to understand.

Suspect

ps. may routers will help you with telephone support (just another thought)

[NickinOz]

....now I have a plethora of IP addresses!!!!

canyouseeme.org

203.xxx.xx.93

whatismyip

203.xxx.xx.101

PC

10.x.x.10

(10 ip address to stop conflict with 192 VPN for work)

and I hope you are my timezone .. or at least enjoy staying up late for prompt replies :)

thanks

[The UnUsual Suspect]

Your external IP address could be dynamic (changes), but that won't matter, as long as your internal address for all your computers is static.

As for being up late, I was just about to shut down for the night when I saw your reply, sorry.

Perhaps one of our support team could take over (but realize we normally try to reply to a post within 24hours, so you just were lucky tonight)

Suspect

[kluelos]

You're fine so far.

When you install a router, you create a private subnet. There are two address blocks that are reserved for private subnets. There's a Class B block at 10.xxx.xxx.xxx and a Class C block at 192.168.x.x So your router will use one or the other of them by default.

Using the Class B is mostly just high hopes. VERY few people actually need multiple thousands of IP addresses on their home networks, but never mind.

Don't worry about your external IP, since you can't control it anyway. You only need to worry about this side of the router, the LAN side. Say that the router's IP address within the LAN is 10.10.0.1. That's the one you use to configure it. Then the router has a DHCP pool, which is all of the other addresses it controls and will, upon request, assign to a computer connected to it that asks for one. You almost certainly don't need more than a few, if any, assignable addresses. These would be for other computers in your house, or for visitors' laptops.

The pool defaults (usually) to very large. You can cut it way down. It's set either by start and end IP, or by start IP and range. All the rest will be static IP's, and you can use any of them. So:

10.10.0.0 - Available but not used because addresses ending with a 0 make people nervous

10.10.0.1 - The router's LAN IP address

10.10.0.2- DHCP pool start address - First dynamic address it will assign if asked to

10.10.0.4- DHCP pool end address- gives us three dynamic IP's (2, 3 & 4) available if ever needed

10.10.0.7 Your computer's static IP. (Why 7? Why not? You could use 42 if you want. You had it at 10, no prob. Anything from 5 to 255 is cool.)

You don't need to tell your router what your computer's IP is. Just set up the DHCP pool this way. Then configure your computer's network connection to use that static IP. Use the router's LAN IP (10.10.0.1 in this example) for both the default gateway and default DNS server. Your netmask (assuming you don't really NEED that Class B) is 255.255.255.0

You should be communicating with the internet no problem at this point. Now go into your router's port-forwarding section (sometimes called a virtual server). You'll tell it you want your BitComet listen port opened, but it will require you to specify the IP address you want it opened for. (It's a security thing, don't want ports opened unless specific machines are expecting traffic on that port and are ready to handle it.) This is where you tell it you want that port opened for the static IP you gave your computer, and you want the port number to be the same. (The router can map incoming port X to local port Y, but you don't want to do that.)

Open (LISTEN PORT) and send it to (MY COMPUTER's LAN IP) on the same port number. Open it for both TCP and UDP traffic, btw.

So: the IPCONFIG command tells you what your computer's LAN IP is, but that's not the IP that everyone sees from the internet. Because you're going through a router, what the world sees is the router's IP: it's WAN IP, which is different from it's LAN side IP. The WAN IP is probably assigned by your ISP via DHCP and you have no control over it.

The WHATSMYIP site, as well as the rest of the internet, only sees your router and doesn't know (or care) what's connected to its LAN side. That happens to be your computer but it could be a roomful of unix boxes and IBM mainframes. or one old Apple IIc, for all the difference it makes. (Except that I want to know how you rigged up an ethernet port for a IIc, but nevermind.)

--------------------------

This takes care of things on your end, but only there. You said you had a wireless internet connection. That could make a huge difference, because a lot of those are also done via router with firewall that blocks ports, etc. But you may not have that issue, and I suspect you will not, because of your external IP address.

Recall we talked about reserved blocks for private subnets? Your ISP doesn't have you in one of those blocks, so you're probably not in a private subnet, and so probably not behind an ISP router blocking you with a firewall.

[NickinOz]

...from my ISP (bunch of good guys)....

As we are now using a quad load-balancer for increased speed and reliability, we have had to NAT some of our connections.

I have set up a port forward on port 50000 that should circumvent this problem.

...and on another post here found a link posted as a test .. getting 92kB/s or so ... but still only slow download speeds on other torrents... so the culprit is looking like the torrents rather than the settings....

If this is the case just what am I looking for to help diagnose the speed issue..

and thanks for the replies.

Cheers

[kluelos]

That was probably the Open Office torrent, and it's a good test for whether things are configured well on your end. Since they are, that is really all you can do.

The biggest factor in download speed is the composition of the swarm, which is not something you can do anything about. It's the aggregate of all the members, their transfer speeds, their connectivity relative to you, and whether there are enough seeds to sustain it all.

[NickinOz]

... as in all things in life we are dependent on others ...

tks to all