# Opening Ports for Torrents



## nutsngum (Jul 20, 2005)

I have a linksys wrt54g and my torrent seem to be sluggish on the upload side. I'm using Tomato Torrent and Transmission currently.

Anyone know a good way to get the damn ports opened up? Any help is greatly appreciated!!


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## Elric (Jul 30, 2005)

Uploads are nowhere near as fast as downloads, what internet connection do you have? Cable/DSL? What are your ISP's speeds advertised on their sites?


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## Carl (Jun 7, 2003)

You don't actually want to open all of the ports. What you want to do is get the client to use a port other than the standard 6881-6889 (that's the ports 6881 through 6889) for torrents. So you go into your router and forward 6881-6889 to your machines IP. Not your router, or your airport, or your outside IP, your machines IP given by the router. When traffic from 6881 to 6889 comes in, you will forward it directly to your machines IP.
Also, you need to encrypt your traffic, so that your ISP (who monitors your traffic) will not be able to determine the kind of traffic you are generating.

I find the best client for all of this to be Azureus. You will open Azureus prefs, change the port to something else, run the NAT test, if OK, then use that port number in your router setup and forward it also to your IP. Then your NAT will be fully open. Uploading is significantly lower speed that DL, but is part of the formula to get good DL speeds. Your connections will give you data based on your performance, so tweaking is a big part of being successful.

Google port forwarding.


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## madgunde (Mar 10, 2006)

Carl said:


> You don't actually want to open all of the ports. What you want to do is get the client to use a port other than the standard 6881-6889 (that's the ports 6881 through 6889) for torrents. So you go into your router and forward 6881-6889 to your machines IP. Not your router, or your airport, or your outside IP, your machines IP given by the router. When traffic from 6881 to 6889 comes in, you will forward it directly to your machines IP.


Carl, I think you may cause confusion by first saying to use a port other than 6881-6889, then go on to tell him to forward those same ports in the router.

nutsngum, set your client software to use a single port that is extremely high (like over 50000) so as to avoid conflicting with anything else. Port 51051 is a perfectly good port number, we'll use that. Then have your Linksys router forward TCP port 51051 to your computer's local IP address, which is most likely in the range of 192.159.0.x or 192.168.1.x. That's it. You only need to use one port number, using a range will not do anything to improve your speeds. Just make sure your Bittorrent client and router are using the exact same port number.

The reason you don't want to use the default range is because many ISPs throttle the speed of traffic on those ports knowing full well that a lot of people use Bittorrent, and it has a tendency to slow their network down.

Edit: Let us know how it works out for you. I had the same Linksys router and found it had problems with Bittorrent crashing it or otherwise really killing internet access for the rest of my computers on the network. Hopefully you won't have this problem.


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## Carl (Jun 7, 2003)

Yeah, you are right. It hurts my head every time I explain it to myself. Good correction.


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## mikeinmontreal (Oct 13, 2005)

Transmission has a FAQ section on portforwarding with and without a router.


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## HowEver (Jan 11, 2005)

Speaking of headhurting here, how would one do this in this setup: DSL modem to wired D-Link router / D-Link router to PC _and_ to Airport Express / Airport Express to Macs (several).

Would the user forward the client software to the 51051-ish port, and the D-Link to TCP port 51051-ish to the Airport's IP, or the computer(s)?




madgunde said:


> Carl, I think you may cause confusion by first saying to use a port other than 6881-6889, then go on to tell him to forward those same ports in the router.
> 
> nutsngum, set your client software to use a single port that is extremely high (like over 50000) so as to avoid conflicting with anything else. Port 51051 is a perfectly good port number, we'll use that. Then have your Linksys router forward TCP port 51051 to your computer's local IP address, which is most likely in the range of 192.159.0.x or 192.168.1.x. That's it. You only need to use one port number, using a range will not do anything to improve your speeds. Just make sure your Bittorrent client and router are using the exact same port number.
> 
> ...


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## madgunde (Mar 10, 2006)

HowEver said:


> Speaking of headhurting here, how would one do this in this setup: DSL modem to wired D-Link router / D-Link router to PC _and_ to Airport Express / Airport Express to Macs (several).
> 
> Would the user forward the client software to the 51051-ish port, and the D-Link to TCP port 51051-ish to the Airport's IP, or the computer(s)?


If the AirPort is just acting as a wireless access point, and the Macs are on the same subnet as the PCs hooked to the DLink, then you just forward the port to the Mac's IP address. If you have no problems filesharing between PCs and Macs, then you should be OK.


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## BurntMonkey (Sep 22, 2007)

Being a 'noob' and this whole torrent, router, port forwarding thing, I'm wondering if anyone would care to walk me through how I would configure my Airport Graphite? The NAT test continues to say that my connection was refused (using port # 53555). I'm sure my router is the problem as I haven't a clue how to 'forward ports to IP addresses and the like."

Thanks for any help.

Cheers,

BurntMonkey


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