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03/13/2005: "Bit Torrent Azureus client and Netgear WGT624"

So I spent a good chunk of time this weekend getting a bittorrent client and trying to get familiarized with good torrent sites. I figured it'd be nice to put some of this together for people who want to get into the torrent quickly and don't want to waste 2 hours surfing.

For those of you curious about the internals of the protocol, the creator of bit torrent supplies the source code and basic documentation.

After reading the basics, you'll probably need a client. There are a lot of clients out there, so I asked Jeff if he had any preferences. He recommended Azureus as a good client. I did some quick checking on Google and found that some critics also chose Azureus as the top client because of transparency and UI. (Disclaimer: I have yet to try any other clients.)

With the Azureus client, you can toggle your torrent view to see which pieces of the torrent and which files in the torrent are being downloaded. You can also toggle the menu's to limit uploads and view your overall download and upload statistics. Best of all, the client is persistent & stateful about your download, so it's able to resume downloading even after a system crash (but I think this is more a feature of the bittorrent protocol as opposed to the type of client).

In terms of installs it's a Java client so it's not particularly lightweight if you don't have the JRE on your machine already. As of this writing you'll need JRE 1.5 along with the client bringing the total download for the client to be well over 100+Mbytes. The good news is that the client developers try to make the download as painfree as possible. During the Azureus install, you're prompted to download the JRE and a browser window pops up to initiate the client download.

If you want to try it out, you can download the Azureus client here.

The next step in your install is ensuring that you've got the proper ports open. By default the Azureus client attempts to bind to port 6881 as its "listen" port and it let's you test connectivity. Do *not* use the default ports of 6881->6889 as designated default by the Azureus client. ISP's have caught on that these are bittorrent ports and some just block traffic to them outright. Instead choose something like 53005 or any ports not currently in use. Just do a netstat and you should get an idea of what's currently in use.

If you've got a router or firewall, you'll need to configure the ports. From what I gather, the Azureus client only uses one port as opposed to some other clients that randomize on a range of ports. You'll need to set up your router to do port forwarding and punch a hole in your firewall if you've got a software firewall.

I've got a Netgear WGT624, so if you've got one of those routers you just need to scroll down on the sidebar to "Advanced" and click on "Port Forwarding/Port Triggering". Just select the "service type" as Port Forwarding and click on "Add a Custom Service", then just specify the name of the new service type and a port.

Now that your custom port forwarding is good to go, just install your client and during the Configuration Wizard set your port number and click on the Test button. If this fails with something like "NAT error" then check your firewall settings, you may need to "punch a hole" or allow unrestricted access to 53005 by the Azureus client.

Anyhow, once you've got all this done then check out some torrent aggregators:
The one I'm currently using is torrentreactor.net. It's kinda slow for some of the anime and shows I want to download, but fast for some movies etc. I didn't realize this at first, so I thought that Azureus was slow. But it just turns out that "swarms" are bounded by their clients'/seeders' upload speeds. This means that stuff which is in demand for high broadband users is gonna be fast to download, whereas things that are "less popular" and have 56k dialup users will be *ass* slow (3kbps) :(.

Anyhow the software/protocol was free, so there's not too much to complain about. Hope this saves one person an hour of wasted time. If anyone out there has comments to add (esp. ways to get faster downloads or good torrent sites) please post!

Replies: 3 Comments

here is a good guide to setup netgear and azereus

http://www.portforward.com/

Hope this helps

Cheers.

:: K :: said @ 05/05/2005 05:07 AM PST

My buddy is in Australia, I am in Canada, he wanted me to test the quality of some files before he spent all the time downloading them with Azureus, but for the life of me I cant get it to work. Netgear WGT624 router and shaw cable modem. Ive tried opening the default ports on the router, and the alternative ones suggested here. Nothing works....sigh. If anyone has any ideas, please drop me an email.

karnak said @ 04/18/2005 08:47 PM PST

I also use Azureus and have a netgear
firewall router but I use http://www.torrentspy.com to find downloads. I prefer it to torrent reactor.

plattypuss said @ 04/04/2005 03:32 PM PST