Getting BitTorrent working mighty fine on Mac OS X by opening TCP ports

This is also true of just plain BitTorrent use. By doing the same procedure on TCP ports 6881-6889, you often increase transmission speeds a lot.

On top of that, which is what your post points out, you can sometimes have ISPs or Organizations (school, work, hotels, etc) that block or throttle traffic on file-sharing ports. In this case, changing ports to a 40,00x port works just fine.

For real enterprises that use quality traffic shapers and firewalls, even port changing won’t work because their system look at the actual packet payload, not just the port number. To get around this… well, google for SSH and port forwarding.

Hope that helps.

Very useful tip - used it in iinet in Australia and worked dramatically well. Cheers mate

I’ve set it up with ports 6881-6999, and yet my ports are registering as closed. Does it take a while to set in? Does it matter that I am using AirPort for internet? I’m so frustrated..

Great stuff, thanks so much it helped wonders!

Ive tried this, found it interesting but when i set it up my download is still funny, although the upload rate did increase massively. My download speed goes from 1.5b/s to 3, then 4.5, 5, 6. then its drops back down (reversely) to zero. then its rises again at regular intervals, the whole up down thing lasts about 6 seconds, up and down constantly…what do i need to do.
the only thing that puzzles about this walkthrough is that i do not have TCP and UDP, i only have TCP. I also was confused by azureus as its prefs only have a port number in the “Incoming TCP listen port”. Any help is much appreciated.

Just a question: What is a good download speed on Bittorrent for u guys? Can´t seem to get it over 6kb/s wich is deadly slow compared to Limewire etc…

Hi. I am trying to get Azureus (bittorrent client) to work at my school, where I guess they block everything they can. Is there a way to make this work. I have tried many ports, none of which work.
Any suggestions welcomed!
thanks.

fucck u all

Hi, I’ve tried this, but don’t have a UDP box, does this matter?

THANK YOU. God, that helps alot.

I’m using Azerus at college, and it worked for about a week and then suddenly it stopped downloading a torrent (right at 95.3% too). So I tried your little trick here with high hopes, but to no avail. It just says my “port is probably closed.” I tried changing the port number around from 39000 to 40000 to 50000 to 65000 and various ports in between, but nothing. What’s the story here?

I’m on Adium: Brien Hopkins

Port settings in Leopard has changed dramatically. My Azureus in Leopard has very poor download speeds. And it suggest to fix the ports. But how?

Unbelievable improvement! Thanks a lot!

Hi as mentioned the port settings on leopard can’t be changed as described above. Any other way? Thanks!

Hey, I have tried downloading torrents on my Macbook, and no matter what I change the ports to, the downloads are ridiculously slow, like 6-20 KBs a second. Does anyone have any other solutions for increasing my download speed?

[...] http://www.dech.co.uk/2006/01/gettin…ing-tcp-ports/ [...]

There doesn’t seem to be a “Firewall” tab when I click on the sharing tab in Apple System Preferences…what do I do as an alternative?

Thanks! Works Great!