Port forwarding

From AzureusWiki

This page and What is NAT provide a general explanation of reachability issues, if you just want to to fix them, have a look at NAT problem

==Yellow Smileys== Smiley faces provide info on your torrents. The yellow smiley indicates that while your system can initiate connections with other peers (known as local connections, or L in the torrent's "Details" tab), you cannot receive connections initiated from other peers (known as remote connections, or R). This is almost certainly caused by incorrectly forwarded ports from your router or firewall. You can see the L's and R's in the Details tab of your individual torrent. If you see only L's, you probably have a Port Forwarding problem. Green smileys mean that you have both L and R connections to peers and are connected to the tracker. For more information on what every smiley means, click Help > About Health.

There are other possible causes for a yellow smiley. If you see a green smiley or have seen one with the same router/firewall configuration, then port forwarding may not be the culprit. Run the Tools > NAT/Firewall test.

==Ports== When you connect to the internet, there are different channels that data travel by. Computers usually handle this perfectly in the background via ports, identified by numbers. For example, MSN protocol usually uses ports 6891-6900. Please see PortIsBlacklisted now for which ports to use. Check out Tantalo or Wikipedia to find out more about ports.

Azureus listens to one port for torrents and another for the embedded tracker. Two protocols, TCP and UDP, use the same port, unless specified otherwise. Thus, you need to forward one listening port for Azureus and tick both the TCP and the UDP boxes, or make an extra rule, one for each protocol.

The only time you will notice the ports is when they are closed; no data is transmitted and you get error messages like "NAT Error." This usually happen because of firewalls and routers.

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NAT

NAT stands for Network Address Translation. The network, which includes your router and computer, needs to translate the Internet Protocol address of your router (with its own IP address) to and from the IP address of your computer (with its own IP address). The router directs traffic to different computers connected to it and can be configured to protect you from specified traffic. It can use port forwarding to redirect data packets to a different address. The address known by the outside world (Wider Area Network, or WAN) is the IP address of your router, which redirects packets according to your instructions to your Local Area Network (LAN) address, or the local IP address of your computer. See below to find out the IP of your MacOS X computer.

When you get the "NAT Error," your NAT is not set up correctly. What is NAT may help too. This is generally do to your router not forwarding the proper ports.