Bittorrent Ports
I was talking to a friend at work today and we got to discussing BitTorrent. If you don’t know, BitTorrent is a file sharing protocol designed to help take the load off file servers by allowing the clients partially downloaded files to be shared with others wishing to download the same file. In theory it would have an amazing practical use for say Linux ISOs or those huge Battlefield Vietnam patches, but it has yet to be adopted by them in many cases. Sadly to say this great technology has taken over the pirating scene and thus BitTorrent has made itself a bad rep in the corporate environment.
At this point I would like to say that I do not promote the use of BitTorrent for piracy or any other piracy programs or actions.
Now back to the topic at hand: Ports!
As I said I was talking to a friend at work, and he mentioned that BitTorrent uses a plethora of ports, and by opening up said ports on your NAT supported router, you could actually increase your speeds. So heres how it works; BT uses ports 6881-6999 (All TCP ports). It uses one port for each connection, so if you do not plan on downloading more then 10 torrents, you only need to open ports 6881-6890. Personally, I opened up all of them just to be safe. At the same time the trackers (servers which BT must connect to in order to start the download) require port 6969 (Also TCP).
If you are behind a router, you will have no problems using BT, however by opening these ports you are allowing both outgoing and incoming traffic to transmit within that range, and this is said to be a sure fire way to increase your speeds.
Read the full article here:
http://btfaq.com/serve/cache/25.html
!–jdyck–!