No More BT

November 30, 2005 6:28 PM

I live in a house with 7 or 8 other people and we share a wireless hub. I download a lot with bittorrent which was working out just fine until about 2 days ago when it suddenly stopped connecting at all. Am I being paranoid or could someone in my house be blocking off BT? Any other ideas?
posted by gonadostat to computers & internet (8 comments total)

You ISP could have decided to cripple popular BT ports. Try changing the ports, if you can.
posted by Manhasset at 6:29 PM on November 30, 2005

It's possible that someone blocked the ports at your end. For this to happen they'd need a reason (belief that you were hogging bandwidth), a method (access to router controls), and a plan(finding the ports being used and blocking them). Because of the technical basis for this, it's possible but unlikely. As was mentioned above, the most likely is that your ISP got wise and blocked the most common BT ports.

Most BT clients allow you to modify the ports used somewhere in the preferences. Some don't. If yours doesn't, download one that allows it, and select different ports. Any port between 1024 and 65535 should be usable, but if it works intermittently than try some others. This method should work whether its your ISP or your roommates.
posted by mystyk at 7:00 PM on November 30, 2005

Oh, and if it works for a while after you change it then stops again, someone is definately blocking actively. That's the case where I'd try to figure out if the problem is on your end or the ISP's. Unless it comes to that, don't even bother.
posted by mystyk at 7:03 PM on November 30, 2005

mystyk writes "For this to happen they'd need a reason (belief that you were hogging bandwidth), a method (access to router controls), and a plan(finding the ports being used and blocking them). Because of the technical basis for this, it's possible but unlikely."

Reason is irrelevant, but method, plan and execution are pretty straightforward once you know what you're looking for. As I suppose you're not making it secret to your housemates you're using Bit Torrent, it was probably very easy to figure out which ports should be blocked. Most (if not all) home routers have web-based configuration tools that allow anyone with some (not much) knowledge to block a port. Bit Torrent default ports are wildly known and all Bit Torrent FAQs talk about them. And the same FAQs have step-by-step illustrated tutorials on how to configure the most common routers - any motivated person can easily adapt the same procedures to block ports instead of opening them.

So, I would first check if the nearest router (ie, the home router) is correctly configure. If not, I would reconfigure it and change the password.

As for the ISP, unless the Terms of Service are very specific, I don't see why they would care to block any particular non-illegal software. As you say, BT can use any port so it is pretty useless to block the default range.
posted by nkyad at 7:29 PM on November 30, 2005

It was either your roommates or your ISP, probably, yes. More likely your roommates unless you were downloading HUGE amounts of stuff, because most ISPs just don't monitor that stuff that closely unless you're causing problems for the neighborhood.

If your roommates blocked it, it's probably because you were being an inconsiderate bandwidth hog (though you may not have realized you were causing trouble). Here's the problem:

Upstream bandwidth on both DSL and cable is limited to a much smaller amount than downstream. When you start approaching that limit, your downstream bandwidth suffers drastically, and then the internet connection sucks for everyone in the house and things are crawling for everything but your happy little bittorrent connection.

If you do get bittorrent up and running -- see how fast it gets at its maximum "upload" speed, and then go into your bittorrent client's preferences (assuming it has such preferences -- if not, download one like BitLord), and set your max upload speed to something at least 30% less than the highest you've seen it go. I'd say less than 30% if you lived alone, but you live with roommates -- give them some bandwidth. Really, you might want to set it even less than that.

For example, if you've seen it go up to 45kb/sec uploading, set your maximum to something like 30kb/sec. This will leave a buffer zone of upstream bandwidth, and prevent your bittorrent upload/download from crippling the whole network for everyone else.
posted by twiggy at 8:15 PM on November 30, 2005

confirm twiggy's good advice, which is a great idea for anyone using bittorent, sharing a connection or not.
posted by lohmannn at 6:07 AM on December 1, 2005

yup, twiggy is givin some good advice there. I stopped using BT ages ago in favour of newsgroups, but that's just my personal preference. (par2 is a GODSEND)
posted by antifuse at 6:22 AM on December 1, 2005

Are you using the default port value for Azureus (or whatever)? Is it possible that an inconsiderate or non-tech-savvy housemate followed the instructions for setting up port-forwarding for Azureus (or whatever) to their machine without realizing they were thus routing it away from yours?

Definitely check your router settings as a first step before confronting housemates or ISP representatives. . .
posted by nobody at 2:42 PM on December 1, 2005