Torrents and Firewall

Emerging Technologies Security and Privacy
1

I have tested a couple of firewall (excluding windows) and i have seen that bit torrent (at least uTorrent) works best when the connections are not filtered.

Even if you have forwarded your port and added uTorrent to list of exempted programs in Firewall settings allowing it full access to internet, the download & upload rate suffers. Even if everything is alright and settings are tweaked, just by switching off my firewall i have seen download speed go up by over 20 to 30 percent. in best case scenarios I have seen speed go up by as much as 50 percent.

Now, i really don’t want to give up on firewalls. So what i want to know is that is there a firewall that is least intrusive. By least, I mean not as intrusive as that of Norton, ZoneAlarm Pro, Kaspersky, ESET.

2

hey dude.

u are misguided.

when i was using xp(now on to ubuntu) , i used utorrent and comodo.

but man configuring both of them correctly will lead to best speeds and firewall will no longer block utorrent speeds.

tips

  1. use non standard ports in p2p(these will not be filtered along the way)i used 11111-11115.

  2. set up port forwarding in ur adsl routers(for those ports)

  3. all p2p apps must use diff port nos like utorrent=11111,shareaza=11112 etc.

  4. set up port forwarding in ur firewall.select logging option(to all the dropped packets)this will tell u if ur firewall dropping utorrents packets.

  5. study those dropped packets. are these packets necessary? try to put allow rules for blocked packets . again watch the speed.

repeat steps till there are no utorrent dropped packets. now ur speed shuld improve.

ps : utorrent is funny , it sometimes uses port 80 to connect to random trackers.thus port 80 shuld also be allowed.

last but not the least join forums for that firewall or utorrent forums and find soln to ur problem.

3

1- I use non-standard ports for uTorrent.

2- Apart from uTorrent I don’t use any other P2P program.

3- Ports used by uTorrent are forwarded in router and there are times when i can max out my upload speeds. Whenever I connect to a tracker, uTorrent always flag my connection “green” rather than yellow.

4- Ports are opened in Firewall too and uTorrent has been added to exempted programs. It has been given full access to Internet. It can accept as well receive connections.

As for studying the dropped packets, I will do it tonight. It could be of help but I doubt it can really improve the traffic by much.

My problem is not that my firewall is crippling my torrent traffic but the fact that I always get best speeds when there is no active firewall. With firewall on, my torrent traffic is decent but without firewall it’s even better.

IMO, you try to run your torrent client after temporary disabling your firewall. See if it positively affects your torrent traffic or not.
Also, let me rephrase my question. What is the best firewall to use with a torrent client, if at all there is something like that?

4

now i am on ubuntu so dont need firewall.

but when on windows i used comodo.

man it is the most advanced , powerful, configurable firewall out there.

it even includes hips(defence+)

it puts commercial soln like norton internet security etc to shame!!!

but it need lots of config(at least initially).

can easily overwhelm a noob