μTorrent and Hardware Firewalls

[ffutures]

I've been using Bittorrent to try various shows before I buy the DVDs, and was never very impressed with its speed; I have a 4mb cable connection, but I was still only getting 4-5k speeds most of the time, and an occasional rare peak of 17k.

Recently I thought I'd try a different program, and discovered that most of them wanted access to the controls of the hardware firewall in my router, and the documentation said that they'd be much slower without it.

So I looked at various suggestions and eventually installed μTorrent which has some very good reviews and is by far the smallest of the bittorrent programs, and enabled UPnP compatibility of the router and its firewall. This does seem to speed up file transfer immensely - I'm typically seeing 50k downloads now, a threefold to tenfold speed increase.

What I'm wondering about is the downside (apart from all other internet access being slow because file transfers hog the bandwidth and are prioritized at the router); does this increase the vulnerability of my network? They say not, but I'd appreciate feedback from anyone who knows this stuff. Presumably the UPnP thing means that any malware that gets onto a network computer may be able to bypass the hardware firewall, don't know if there are other risks.

Later: I posted this a couple of places, someone suggested this site which helped me configure it manually:

http://portforward.com/

Comments

[turol.livejournal.com]

UPnP allows software inside your network to tell the firewall to let some inbound traffic enter the network. It could (theoretically) increase vulnerability if you have buggy/malicious software/hardware.

Alternatively you could figure out what ports bittorrent wants and manually tell your firewall to pass that traffic on but this operation is beyond most people.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I find that when using something like μTorrent I get terrible latency on my line so ssh'ing to a remote server becomes unusable.

Personally I dont like uPnP but most people I know who have expressed an opinion dont mind it. It is even required by some commercial VPN software I use.

[turol.livejournal.com]

I find that when using something like μTorrent I get terrible latency on my line so ssh'ing to a remote server becomes unusable.

Limit your client's upstream and downstream bandwidth to about 90% of your actual bandwidth. This prevents saturation of your link and keeps latencies manageable.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

I was getting speeds of up to 110 with BitTorrent. I use the Mac OS X software firewall, and enabled BitTorrent on the requested port (as per the instructions).

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I think the big block has always been the router - this seems to have fixed that, there may be ways to fine tune it more but 50k is a very good start.