Topic: airport extreme/ port forwarding

[Jhurlbs81]

Hey Guys-

I haven't seeding anything on Bittorrent in a while, and when I tried just recently I have been able to D/L, just not seed.  I've heard Cox is restricting BT traffic, but I have a feeling I might not have my ports forwarded.  Never did anything special in the past, and I always got good speeds both up and down.  So how can I check to see if I'm configured correctly.  I did the NAT/Firewall test thats built into one of the BT clients I tried, and  it said I wasn't configured properly.  Any good (current) resources on port forwarding.   I run Mac OSX 1.4.11 and my wireless router is an airport extreme.

Also looking for a simple 30,000' view of port forwarding.  I understand a comupter has 60,000 or so ports, but when you forward a port what are you actually doing?  Opening it on your router?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Gotta get this stuff down before Phish tour!

Thanks
Jesse

[Steve J]

I'll look at mine when I get home (memory isn't nearly as good as it used to be). I did a while back; and it was really quite easy.

[Steve J]

OK...this is how I did it

- Check to see what the IP of your local machine first (System Preferences> Network> Airport> Advanced> TCP/IP)
- Check to see what port your BT client is running (mine just did the standard 6881-6889)
- Open the Airport Utility
- Click 'Manual Setup'
- Click 'Advanced'
- Click 'Port Mapping'
- Click the '+'
- Under 'Service: Choose a service' select 'Personal File Sharing'
- Under 'TCP Ports' (public & private), enter the ports your BT client is using (for me, that was the range 6881-6889)
- Enter the 'private' IP address for the machine you are using
- Click continue
- You'll be asked to give the service a name
- Click done
- Click 'Update'

It'll take a few seconds for the Extreme to update itself; and then you should be good to go.

[Fried Chicken Boy]

You kind of answered your ending questions: the simple answer is yes, you are setting up your router and/or firewall to accept internet traffic through a port to be used by a particular program.  The general consensus is that you should use a port in the upper registers (say, between 40,000 and 60,000) as there seems to be a little more "room to breathe".

There is a great website call PortForward.com that can pretty much walk you through how to set up your computer and most routers for port forwarding.  The page with the guides is here -> http://www.portforward.com/guides.htm.  Hopefully, Steve J's instructions will go smoothly and you won't need the website.  Quite a few service providers are throttling upload speeds (mine included; bastards!) so I don't think there's much you can do about that.

Personally, the single most important thing that I did when forwarding the ports on my computer was to set up a static IP address and then everything seemed to fall into place, but YMMV.  Good luck.

[Jhurlbs81]

Cool.  Thanks guys!

The portforward.com website rocks.  Very clear, up-to-date information.  Setting up the static IP and the port forwarding was a breeze with the right instructions. 

I'd +T ya if I could!

Thanks
Jesse