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I used to torrent a lot, but gave up after my ISP adopted CGNAT and I lost the capability to forward ports locally. Do people adapted bittorrent to IPv6, since

by Qem 5y ago

I used to torrent a lot, but gave up after my ISP adopted CGNAT and I lost the capability to forward ports locally. Do people adapted bittorrent to IPv6, since then, to circunvent this problem, or are we still stuck with IPv4 in this space?

dmos62 5y ago
I'm a newby in these topics. I'm pretty sure that bittorrent has worked in ipv6 for a long time now; actually, I find it unintuitive that it would care whether one or the other is used. Also, doesn't bittorrent work fine without port forwarding? I'm pretty sure that I used to run it that way for a long time when my ISP didn't give me a public IP.
- Qem 5y ago
  It works, but the number of peers and speeds decrease a lot. At least in my experience. I haven't deep knowledge on how the protocol works.
  - Anunayj 5y ago
    Port forwarding will allow you to receive connections from clients that are themselves behind NATs, and would also allow you to participate in DHT which would allow you to discover clients faster. Though in ideal cases (ones with high active seeders), that isn't going to affect performance that much. Torrent can also use UDP hole punching, but that can sometimes be finnicky behind CGNATs
  - louis-lau 5y ago
    Correct. At least one side must have an open port. So if that's you you can peer with everyone instead of only people with open ports.
no_time 5y ago
People torrent just fine behind CGNAT though? I never understood how hole punching works but im pretty sure the protocol has something like that.
vxNsr 5y ago
I've never had to do any port forwarding on my local router do torrent anything, I'm not sure what you were experiencing but it might have been transient.
cassianoleal 5y ago
Some VPN providers, like Mullvad, offer the option of port-forwarding. I'm not sure if it would work for torrenting but I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't.
- Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
  > Some VPN providers, like Mullvad, offer the option of port-forwarding. The thing is Mullvad offers dynamic Port-Forwarding only. They get to decide what port number they can grant for users and users cannot request for a specific port. There are VPNs that have static port-forwarding which is rare. There are less than 5 VPN providers that have static port-forwarding from what I remember and users can decide what port number they want (unless specific port number is taken prior). It would be a pain if someone have a range of applications that already using specific port prior and would have to change them to use the VPN's defined port number depending on how much applications they have to change.
  - cassianoleal 5y ago
    Not dynamic. Randomised. Once created, it doesn't change/ I have yet to see a torrent client that doesn't let you specify the public port it's listening on.

by Qem 5y ago

dmos62 5y ago

I'm a newby in these topics. I'm pretty sure that bittorrent has worked in ipv6 for a long time now; actually, I find it unintuitive that it would care whether one or the other is used. Also, doesn't bittorrent work fine without port forwarding? I'm pretty sure that I used to run it that way for a long time when my ISP didn't give me a public IP.

Qem 5y ago
It works, but the number of peers and speeds decrease a lot. At least in my experience. I haven't deep knowledge on how the protocol works.
- Anunayj 5y ago
  Port forwarding will allow you to receive connections from clients that are themselves behind NATs, and would also allow you to participate in DHT which would allow you to discover clients faster. Though in ideal cases (ones with high active seeders), that isn't going to affect performance that much. Torrent can also use UDP hole punching, but that can sometimes be finnicky behind CGNATs
- louis-lau 5y ago
  Correct. At least one side must have an open port. So if that's you you can peer with everyone instead of only people with open ports.

no_time 5y ago

People torrent just fine behind CGNAT though? I never understood how hole punching works but im pretty sure the protocol has something like that.

vxNsr 5y ago

I've never had to do any port forwarding on my local router do torrent anything, I'm not sure what you were experiencing but it might have been transient.

cassianoleal 5y ago

Some VPN providers, like Mullvad, offer the option of port-forwarding. I'm not sure if it would work for torrenting but I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't.

Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
> Some VPN providers, like Mullvad, offer the option of port-forwarding. The thing is Mullvad offers dynamic Port-Forwarding only. They get to decide what port number they can grant for users and users cannot request for a specific port. There are VPNs that have static port-forwarding which is rare. There are less than 5 VPN providers that have static port-forwarding from what I remember and users can decide what port number they want (unless specific port number is taken prior). It would be a pain if someone have a range of applications that already using specific port prior and would have to change them to use the VPN's defined port number depending on how much applications they have to change.
- cassianoleal 5y ago
  Not dynamic. Randomised. Once created, it doesn't change/ I have yet to see a torrent client that doesn't let you specify the public port it's listening on.