!! How to become connectable (fun, fast & easy guide) !!

for some it is the question "How to be connectable AGAIN?", for others it is "why be conectable?" before it becomes "how to become one?"

i suggest this topic to replace the old "connectivity topic", and right from the start we'll go with a few guidelines, tips, advice and opinions how to solve the connectivity problem (the one above).

for me it's always the first question, and always, i mean, once in a few months: when power goes out or internet signal is lost for a while, after reboot/restore my torrents will start showing up as "not connectable" or "poor" in my account. why? i think, because my "sharing ports" get closed off somehow, or locked, or too overwhelmed and overloaded, or maybe firewall somehow gets into some weird loop, who knows... this can last for a few hours or days, depending how much time i waste on it... but this is down below..

so let's see... if you're here because you Want or Need to ...

become connectable for the first time

 99% of the time the solution is to Open Ports for your torrent client to be able to listen to the "outside world", or rather to accept incoming connection requests from other torrent clients

 remaining 1% of the situations deal with local software settings on your computer and other electronics that you're using for torrents.. these days it could easily be your smartphone where you download new torrents.. these situations are explained in the next block below - "be connectable again"

so lets see what could be done to become connectable...

you need to OPEN PORTS (some say to "FORWARD PORTS") to allow for easy incoming connections. there are usually 2 types of ports: a) ports in your Software Firewall and b) ports in your modem, router, or both (usually modem acts as router these days). simple 'network switches' are usually not programmable, so they have no ports to open, simple modems also usually lack this option, relying firewall management onto the computer software. but if you have more than 1 computer at home or office you've met with routers before... well, they have ports and those ports also need forwarding to let connections in (and out, sometimes)...

 for dealing with routers and their ports, there's a great resource for that

 https://portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/

the link will put you on the page of router manufacturers, you find yours there, click it and go into the page of 'first help', skip all ads and find a link for "DEFAULT GUIDE", or find your software you want to open ports for in the list and see a guide specially tailored for that software.

i do not recommend installing any software packages from portforward.com, i am not in any way associated with the resource, but they do have the biggest collections of all types of routers with screenshots on what to do and where to click and really chewed it all down to nothing. site is heavily commercialized, but info there is very useful. why do they have guides for all kinds of software? because that software allows for setting of ports to use while communicating, thus specialized guides might help if you do not know your torrent client software yet good enough to find things on your own.

it's not enough to just open ports and forget about them... when opening ports, you will need to decide what computer ports you want to dedicate to your torrent client. i would recommend setting them as a range of a 100 to a 1000 numbers somewhere above 40.000 and below 60.000, i usually have ports 49000 to 49100 open (and given to file-sharing) in my router. after Forwarding a group of ports open on your router, you will need to set 1 port from this group or whole group in your torrent client. things should be better now. to check if you've become connectable, there's usually a tool in all new torrent clients now, it will ask some random website to connect to you and to tell it back if it was a successful connection, thus providing you an instant report "as seen by the outside world".. i don't want to lie about other clients but i've seen this function in utorrent, and i am sure bittorrent client will also have it, since it's built by utorrent team as well.. if this tool tells you all is good, then go ahead and stop all your torrents (in case of thousands - simply restart the client), and start them again after a minute or two of wait. always remember, ports set in your torrent client must match the interval you opened in your router.

if forwarding ports didn't help (just yet), check your computer for software firewalls enabled. usually torrent clients can handle software firewalls on first start, or firewall will announce this first start of the client and it's attempts to listen to incoming connections. the easiest way in such case is to allow client do things on its own, granting it full incoming and outgoing connections rights and permissions. sometimes you can have more than 1 firewall on your computer, there can be Windows firewall enabled together with an Anti-Virus Package Firewall (Norton has one, McAffee does too), so you could really have 3 firewalls set up. well, maybe not 3, because usually software firewall will act up if paired with Windows Firewall (dunno about android firewalls, never messed with those, i guess i need to for the completeness of this guide, later) and will tell you to stop this maniacal over-protection syndrome bulsht..:)

 naturally, you only need 1 firewall, it is a straight-forward code, - close off or let them in... but i'd recommend having a 2 step firewall - enabled both on router and on your computer. first router will stop and turn away all suspicious activities even before they get your computer firewall, so 95% of the hack-crack-attack pretense will be shut down on its way, and 5% of sophisticated attacks that do get through somehow, will crash into the not-less-sophisticated computer firewall software, which will stop everything on its way.. unless attacker somehow exploits vulnerabilities in some other software, like this client that you've just allowed to have full in and out communications, plus it has HDD write/read permissions, so with proper exploits they could overtake your computer... but be sure nothing like that happens, and if it did, Internet Community would know and would let you know somehow, and that is why having latest versions of software is usually good because they close new found holes, although new holes can appear...

it's an unending circle, but there's more room for actions of your anti-virus program, which should be monitoring unauthorized HDD/RAM/ROM reads/writes, and report on any suspicious activities there. but oh well, i just wanted to assure you, opening ports in your router and allowing software get in and out through your firewall is very safe, and it really pays off later, when your download speed grows 10 times...

some firewalls will have only simple options, such as "give full access" or "block" some software from internet communications, or allow them only one way in or out for some software, other software packaged firewalls will allow deep customization up to setting the ports trough which this software can communicate, single ports or groups, times of day, day of week, etc, etc.. but in the end we need one simple result: our torrent client software must be allowed through the computer firewall software (and all its instances, be that more than 1).

 this covers most of the ways to become connectable.. but not all of them, of course. there are exclusions of all the rules, there are complicated configurations of modem, router, switch and another router and some more switches and all that stuff on top of a shared apartment building connections, where no matter how one tries, he will never be able to reach the final (or first) firewall that blocks the incoming connections. then it is up to the main network admin to open some ports and to allow requests to come in. some routers and firewalls block certain ports by default, so always make sure try opening big chunks of ports in higher ranges, to exclude situations with blocking by default (ports above 40k will always work fine).. some firewalls will not allow for configuring, or sysadmins will close such options, and again it's impossible to open up a tunnel...

so... yes, sometimes being connectable is not possible. do not think too low of yourself if this guide doesn't help... sometimes it just won't work, that's it..

and now lets discuss the question

how to become connectable again

 yes, this happens, as i mentioned earlier, being connectable for years might tomorrow turn into the opposite just because... reasons are - in most cases - clogged up ports and other communications channels.. it happens to me too, rarely, maybe 1-2 times a year, but it does happen and here i will lay out the suggestions on how to overcome such situations...

please, note, this mostly relates to the case when ALL 100% OF YOUR PEERS are NOT CONNECTABLE. if even 1 peer reports as "good", then all of them will eventually report good. it either means that you've just managed to open the way in, and this first peer confirms it.. or it means that tracker was overloaded when checking connectivity with your peers, thus marking them not connectable. your client could be slow on reply, network can be slow or overloaded right now, so some peers will be marked good and others - bad. this situation is not an extreme one, this means that you are connectable, you just need to restart not connectable torrents and keep going..

stop, wait 10-15 sec, and then re-start several un-connectable peers (torrents in your client). wait another 10-15 sec, naje sure torrents in your client turn green (and tracker status shows "OK" or time-till-next-update) refresh your profile page on tribalmixes and see if anything has changed. if at least one torrent turned connectable, repeat the process with all remaining poor peers. if none of the peers turned to good, try this a couple more times and move on to the next step.. generally this first step is done/re-done after every step below. it is an alternative way to test your connectivity. but don't forget, clients like utorrent have their own tools to check if connectivity has been acquired. in utorrent client click ALT+[O] for Options, and then [G] for Network Setup Guide and look on the bottom half of the popup window...

tweak your upload/download speeds, if this all is happening while heavy sharing is in place. for faster/better  COMBINED up/down speeds experience in general you should limit uploads to about 80-85% of what your max upload speed is. this way you leave a bit of a room for back-forth bittorrent communications, like one client telling the other it has this current packet of data and that sender should switch to the next packet, or resent this one, if it came out faulty and hashes don't match. 15-20% of your upload bandwidth will actually allow for faster upload speed, will let client manage it better internally, and won't let it max out the upload, thus stopping all other communications, including those that check for connectability. your connection and client might simpy be overloaded with the sending/receiving of data to pay attentions to the server trying to see through those connectivity issues. it is also recommended to limit your download speed to 90-95% of your maximum, but download is usually tenfold faster than upload, thus limiting there only seems kinda silly.. but worth to try.

some of the torrent clients have options to try and bypass firewalls and other restrictions. for example, utorrent's "Connections" tab in Preferences has 3 options that you might find useful and should put a check-mark in to enable them: 1) Enable UPnP port mapping, 2) Enable NAT-PMP port mapping, 3) Add Windows Firewall Exception. i have all three enabled. just in case. to be honest, i don't know what the second option means, but i enable it anyways... i also use a very old version of utorrent - 2.2.1 - which i find perfect and good and never want to switch to newer versions of the client, simply because it's become ambiguous and excessive, anyways, maybe in the newest versions this is by default and is not shows as options in preferences, i don't know, but the point is obvious - try to enable other possible ways for other torrent clients to communicate to yours. if you have a proxy server and use it, then you will need to set it up with its credentials in the same connection tab in utorrent, or other client, each has such options section..

now try and change Incoming Ports in your torrent client. it can usually be done via Options/Preferences -> Connection tab, i have 49003 set up permanently there, but i have ports of 49000-49100 opened in my router, so in case of port-jam, as i call it, it is enough to just set 49005 there and it helps in half of the cases. restart some peers or use connectivity tools and services to check if yours has changed. don't forget, only change port/ports to something you've opened in firewalls, if software firewall also has option of certain ports to be assigned to other internet-needing software, those ports must match your client ports and be in the range of ports open for communications in your router.

turn down extras that might clutter the channel too much, announcing your 1000-s of torrents in DHT might consume alot of your bandwidth... setting DHT off, enabling uTP, maybe disabling scrape (temporarily) might help get the desired results... maybe try disable protocol encryption and allow incoming legacy connections...

no work? try to restart your torrent client. shut it off, wait a minute, the start it again. preferably with different ports set up already... if you have thousands of torrents (i have 14k torrents in my utorrent), for the testing period it's good to lower the "active torrents" number to, lets say, a 100, so that your torrent client wouldn't be troubled much by announcing your 1000-s of torrents on all of the trackers you use just to check if connectivity has come true or not by restarting the client... also in "stopping part", client won't need to tell tracker it's stopping all the 1000-s of torrents, thus start up and shut down much faster.

still no help? now it's the turn of the modem/router to be power-cycled. simply turn the router off, let5 it sit for 30 seconds. also helps to disconnect the internet cables, they say, strong signal sometimes lives on even after the power down of the router... don't know if it's true, but it did help me once... if you have switched and other networking gear, this would be the best time to power-cycle all of it. now try the tests...

not that still? try to restart your computer now, pairing it with power-cycling of the network gear, and the latter must happen after your computer shuts off but before OS loads up, thus it might be useful to simply turn off the computer, power-cycle networking gear, and then turn computer back on.

sometimes solutions might be hidden in deep complicated settings of the client. like for example, increasing Max Half-Open Connections number might sometimes help to free some connections to allow for tracker checks of connectivity to get through and be answered... there still might be more reasons...

 so these are the simple ways to deal with the trouble. it's always a matter of "change this -> check; change that -> re-check", until finally it starts working. as i said above, i must mention it here: sometimes there's no way to fix the problem right now. sometimes it's good to wait a few hours or days, let it run its course and run out.. during my many years of "connectable" fighting and propaganda, i've used this "screw it" method 3 or 4 times, and it helped. 3 times connectivity came back 1-3 days later, and in one case simply trying things 1 week later with a different approach and clear head has also helped...

now some EXTREME MEASURES that will require alot of work if performed, and possible monetary involvement. please, beware. follow these methods on your own risk.

extreme measure: reset your router configuration and set up all the port-forwarding rules again, preferably with slightly different port ranges. in most extreme cases, routers might need firmware update. messing with firmware - you must be a very good hardware specialist. i consider myself half a specialist, maybe, really dunno how to praise thy-self, but anyways, i've tried firmware update once in my life and ruined a good router through that. it is funny to look at it, trying to blink its way into a working state... but restarting and restarting, over and over... so be careful.. only do firmware if you know what you're doing.

some routers go bad.. if you only have 1 router separating your computer from the not-shared internet line, an extreme solution would be to ask your friend for a spare router to check your setup with, and see if your router is faulty... you can also purchase a new router, and then turn it back if it's not the case and you don't want it...

some ISP-s (internet provider companies) might throttle bittorrent communications on known ports and on uknown ports too, just sifting it out of the "whole traffic"... this is another good reason to set ports in higher ranger. standard ports 6881-6891 given initially to torrent data flow are most likely blocked by half of the firewalls and quarter of all ISPs... an extreme measure in this case would be to switch your internet provider..

extreme measure: replace your computer networking card and cables that run from modem to the router and to the computer. sometimes calling a technician could prove that signal is too low and lots of data requests get lost on the way, thus causing many connectability issues, although, i am guessing, that will be notable in browsing itself, not just torrent traffic.

this is big article and i've tried to lay out many situations and many ways to resolve those situations. but there are a million more cases and each one is different, and many have been solved already, so please try this old connectivity topic and see if something somewhere has been answered already:

 https://www.tribalmixes.com/forums.php?action=viewtopic&topicid=28

read through all my advice and try to follow and do as i recommend and see if all methods help, besides extreme ones, and then write here your situations, your set up, what routers and networks are in between you and the internet, and maybe we can help you out and find other methods and enrich this guide somehow...

Excellent run down on how to become connectable! May I just add one thing though,and I am sure that you have heard it before,although it is important when in uk! - There is a fair usage policy in effect,which limits down/upload speed at certain times during the day and evening too! This was put in place from most of the uk service providers during peak hours,to enable users to access xbox live,play station online,BBC i-player,and someother resources that demand high speed! So if you are on Virgin,Talk Talk,or cable internet in uk,please remember,that the bandwidth is allocated from British Telecom,and peak time capping for all torrents is a reality!

Is Port Forwarding still necessary? I use a tablet and various WiFi connections so do not always have admin access to whatever WiFi router I'm using at the time.

I never have problems with downloading, so I assumed that the port forwarding is happening automatically. But since this is a ratio site, I notice my uploads are not going very quickly. Perhaps there are just no leechers?

this is, of course, a conversation of its own - how to maximize your uploads, how to squeeze the max out of your uplink connection, etc..

but in a few words, yes, port forwarding is still important, but it can be avoided and everything will still work, only, as you properly have noticed, ratio might suffer. that is due to the way unconnectable peers work, - connection can only be done when such a peer initiates it, and that happens when such peer updates with the tracker and gets ip addresses of those downloading files at that moment. that happens once per 75-90 minutes. when downloader beings the download, the client checks with the tracker for sources, and gets all of them not depending on connectable status (why would we not let you try all of the sources?), then peer initiates its own connections to all of the seeders, and instantly starts downloading, because there are many connectable seeds on any torrent. so with up/down speeds high and awesome these days, any download pretty much ends in minutes, and unconnectable peers only get a tiny piece of the action.

opening ports is not the only way to become connectable, or rather, is not the only step on your way to connectability, but it is an important one.

more info on becoming connectable

here's my own example of these past 24 hours. so long it took me to become connectable again after upgrading my internet connection, getting a different IP address and new modem/router, since the old one couldn't produce faster speeds...

anyways, my setup is simple, modem/router feeds on the main dsl line, and directly into 2 computers from there, and both computers have mcAffee as antivirus and firewall. as recommended, i have windows firewall disabled. after all this change, i was fully unconnectable. what did i do...

1. start with the easy stuff - adding mcAffee permissions for port and for my client - utorrent. those were in place already, but why i mentioned them, - because they are needed too. your firewall might ban the client or disallow it to open ports, so it's good to have a simple way in - for others to reach your torrent client. and by the way, it's 100% safe (as long as you're using ports that are not used by anything else [that might be overtaken by hackers]), my router firewall actually has a list of most used ports and the software involved.. check out yours or maybe some online service to find ports that are not used by anything. i think i can vouch for my favorite ports: anything from range from 49000 to 49900. although i use just one in utorrent, i prefer having a range open in router, cause sometimes ports may get overwhelmed and stop functioning right, and i switch to some other one and return to my most favorite one later again - port 49003.

2. i go into my router. usually all routers say on the side what ip address to use to access them, along with the code to open locked pages of the settings, mine was 192.168.1.254, that is normal for AT&T, my ISP, i think... so in there i find NAT/Gaming section and add new service for utorrent by opening ports 49000-49900 for full in/out traffic, while setting 49003 as the main port there, dunno why that option was there.. and that's it, i simply go and start checking how it all works. i notice no change. for a couple of hours i experiment with different rules, settings and options and nothing.. in most cases i just stop-start my client. which causes it to massively start new peers or close them with the tracker, and that is some traffic, apparently..

3. anyways, clients are smart now, if there are many torrents to be started, they do bursts of 5-10 torrents per every few seconds, which allows them to spread the traffic while registering all the hundreds of started torrents in minutes.. shutting utorrent down still causes a momentary burst of all the torrents trying to be closed and unregistered with the tracker, so it is a problem, but in any case, i start noticing some torrents became connectable. yay success!! i also set these bursts at 5 torrents every few seconds, that gives more connectable, but still alot are not, and i seed like 13k torrents with 2k active, so they circulate alot, especially since i am on the new system and there are rules for all being seeded for equal times and ratio minimums to reach, so sometimes it can stop 100 and start new 100 torrents in just 2-3 minutes, so i am seeing more and more connectable, but not enough yet...

4. i go to sleep.. i seed so many torrents that even fully unconnectable i still manage to have 20-30 simultaneously active torrents at all times..

5. i check in the morning - more than half connectable. i figure, they like to be slowly switching to connectable status, but stopping a 100 of them and starting new 100 manually only gives like 10-20 new connectables. so i keep thinking... and trying here and there... nothing helps to be fully connectable, and i notice now my bad to good ratio is actually growing, more bad peers that good ones now.. this sucks, i think...

6. and try the hard measures - i am turning off mcAffee firewall to see who is causing this stuff, and surely it was the modem/router that did it, not entirely so, i mean, not to all peers, cause some ended up connectable, but the majority of peers suffered.

7. i go into the modem again, and there it is, the stupid rule, or 4 of them, in the advanced rules section:

Flood rate limit = 4
Flood burst limit = 8
Flood limit UDP enable = on
Flood limit TCP enable = on

so when my client did bursts of 5 torrents, and when tracker would try to connect back to them to check the connectability, they were most likely half dropped because of the limits..

i go with setting limits to 15 and 20, which fully resolves the issue.

and i see that also disabling flood limits on either UDP or TCP, or both, would also solve the problem. i am not sure what utorrent uses more, it can be observed in torrent details in peers tabs - seeing how your client initiates or receives connection, which transport uses, each peer there says it with one-letter flags as codes...

summary and thoughts

i was thinking to set such a rule when one peer is found connectable - all should be auto-set connectable. but now i am against it actually.. not having such a rule pushed me to investigate the culprit, the reason behind so many unconnectable peers and to resolve the matter. now i am 100% connecatble again!!

PS and here's what my modem/router actually said about all these options:

Flood Limit: This feature allows for control of the acceptance of bursting new traffic. When you enable packet flood detection, you can adjust the "Flood Limit" and "Flood Burst Limit". When these limits are reached, the packets will be dropped.
Flood rate limit: Limit in packets per second. If a packet flood exceeds this rate, it will be dropped.
Flood burst limit: The maximum number of packets in a burst. If a packet flood exceeds this limit, packets will be dropped.
Flood limit UDP enable: Allows you to include or exclude UDP traffic from flood-limiting.
Flood limit TCP enable: Allows you to include or exclude TCP traffic from flood-limiting.
Flood limit ICMP enable: Allows you to include or exclude ICMP traffic from flood-limiting.
Flood limit TCP SYN-cookie: Allows you to protect from TCP floods using the technique of TCP SYN Cookies.

mmmm interesting, Slash i never played with flood settings outside of the default settings which come with utorrent. What about playing with the settings on a non windows based setup, have you adjusted those settings?

To this day, the most critical settings outside of specific issues relative to the individual, are the port forwarding and removing virus software blocking traffic.

I think i have been 100% connectable from day one, bar the few changes in hardware, routing and software exchanges over the period of 7 years.

Hi there! I'd like to share as much as I can, not just for the ratio and stuff. But I don't understand which seems to be the problem.-
The site says that half of my torrents are connectable, so, How come? I mean, if there are some that can be reached, why the others cannot? I have so far tried forwarding ports on the router, as well as using UPnP. But have the same result both ways.-
And also, I see that the program itself IS connectable for there are quite a numer of uploads, from others sources.-
BTW, I tend not to delete anything, for indeed thankful I am to whom that keep stuff in their hard disks to others to download. Almost anything I have downloaded so far from this site is here.-
Any sugestions?
Thanks in advance, this site is realy a great place on the internet!

have you ever had more than 50% of good peers? have you ever wondered what that little wrench icon means? next time you see it - click it, and check it out...

just because it might be hard to locate, here's the link www.tribalmixes.com/fixpeers.php

and here's what it says:

Thanks Slash! Now they are all connectable! None of them is being uploaded though, wonder why it is. I haven't even seen the wrench, but now I know it, and understand it, Thanks indeed for the explanation.-
The thing I don't quite get is:
so the best strategy would be not to stop client at all. or set it up, like utorrent allows, start with 20-30 peers, then queue all other peers you have (i keep 200-700 peers seeding in my utorrent at all times), and let them all start if full bw is not used, there's such an option in utorrent and probably in other clients as well.

I use utorrent, so I'd like to do it. How is it done?
Thanks again man!

I have gone through this how to guide and i'm still not connectable ... this is one of the main factors that drags my share ratio down mostly when i am seeding the life out of torrents

I currently have 8 non connectable ones all on force start seeding and 6 of these have been so for 24 hours now

use uTorrent and on TalkTalk ....  

Yes me too...i read carefully all instructions and advices and i do everything except router settings.
Im still not connectable...im going crazy...
Somebody can explain me why on many other torrent sites im ok and here no ?
Thank you

Why? Why everything except the router setting? This usually means your port is not forwarded (ie opened for your computer) and you will never get connectable.

On other torrent sites there are often tons of peers and seeds. You can connect to some of them. And thats enough if there are so many. But you will not connect to other non-connectables. With just a few seeds and peers this matters and influences your ratio.

Just a little bit of information about your system and configuration, what have you done so far to get connectable would be useful to help you.

I have now the same problem, I am not connectable!
Using uTorrent 2.2.1 and I changed nothing on my well running system.
From one day to another, I became the problems..
I checked my Windows Firewall settings, Ports are forwarded. I configured the settings now by myself, changed ports and set them up in uTorrent, but nothing helps..
There is no router I can setup, because my Server is connected by the NIC directly with the Internet.
Maybe someone have an idea what I can do now?!

EDIT:
Okay, I installed now a new version from uTorrent 3.3.2, and now it works again! Strange why the old one don't work..

Thanks,
Masterslice