Crappy Netopia Router and Torrents

Rollo Tamasi

I know that a lot of people ask about port forwarding on routers to help torrent speeds. I'm not a novice at all, and my netgear router at home flys with big big speeds for torrent files. However this pile of **** of a Netopia Router (eircom 2meg bb) is a horror and a half. I have gone into the admin area, gone to Expert Mode, then onto configure, then advanced and then NAT. This is where it gets anal.

What is the setup here for Torrents?
Define Custom Service
-- Do you [FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Port Forwarding: Range of Ports or
--- [/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Trigger Ports

and once that selection is made you get boxes like these back

[/FONT] [FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Service Name:[/FONT] Torrent
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Global Port Range:[/FONT] ??????
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Base Host Port:[/FONT] ????????[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]
Protocol:[/FONT] [FONT=Arial, Helvetica] TCP [/FONT]

What to do?
and if someone says "portforward.com is all you need", i will eat my hat

irishpartyboy

I thought you said you weren't a novice??

Tar & feather that heap of junk Netopia and get yourself a Netgear.

blorg

Well, portforward.com _is_ all you need. Have you followed their instructions? Seriously, though, I think on those Netopias you are looking for 'pinholes' in the advanced setup.

8T8

If your router supports UPnP which I'm pretty sure most Eircom supplied ones do then enable it (by default it's off).

Go into your Bittorrent program Azureus or UTorrent etc and enable UPnP it will now automatically map the correct ports without having to do anything more.

If you want to manually do it you must;
Take down the ports being used by the program and whether they are TCP or UDP, then fill in those details in your port forwarding setup. Usually you must also supply the IP address of your computer or a range along with the ports that are used by the program, start and end can be the same.

The the ports used can be found in the options menu of your BitTorrent client.


e.g.
Service Name: BitTorrent
Global Port Range: 34567 - 34567
Base Host Port: 34567
Protocol: TCP

Service Name: BitTorrent
Global Port Range: 45791 - 45791
Base Host Port: 45791
Protocol: UDP

blorg

You may have a newer Netopia than the the one I was familiar with. You want to use 'range of ports' and then I would imagine you want to create a new service with the port you need to forward - use the same port number for both 'global port range' and 'base host port' and then you need to find a screen that will let you assign this service to a specific IP on your LAN.

blorg

If UPnP works, by all means, go for that.

stevenmu

I think I setup 2 services, one for TCP and one for UDP, and in both I just put the port I wanted Azeurus to use for both global range and base. Then in the menu you create the services from, you have to select them from the drop down and activate/enable them to point them to the IP address of your machine.

It seemed a little convoluted first time round, but after I got it working once it made a bit more sense.

Rollo Tamasi

UPnP is enabled. I have setup the router as previously outlined in portforward.com before, hense why i hate that site. I'm getting speeds of 16kbps on a file which has 19(934) seeds and 55(4733) peers :mad:

makes no sense to me

8T8

If you are getting the okay from the BT client that their isn't a NAT error then it simply may be the case that the Netopia's router is bollocks which isn't something that difficult to imagine.

Not all routers are equal, some can handle many more simultaneous connections that others and not kill your net connection either while using something as strenuous as BitTorrent.

Personally I go with US Robotics SureConnect line, rock solid and never has any problems and can handle the load of BT plus whatever else you can throw at it quite nicely.

If by any chance you are doing something else on your network or downloading more than one torrent at a time I suggest you stop that and leave the Caymen Netopia do the job on its own.

Alternatively look for a firmware update for the router or lower the number of connections allowed in your BT client (conversely try raising the number of connections and see what happens).

bishopLEN

Ok here it goes I hope this works.

Go into Add/Remove Programs > Add/Remove Windows Components > Networking Services > Tick UPnP User Interface. And install.

Your netopia should be detected by windows, and icon should display on the bottom right beside the time, anyway.

Don't use ZoneAlarm as a software firewall, there seems to be issues with it.

Set the Netopia firewall to low if it still doesn't work, also chage the Azureus port number to something random. Restart Azureus.

Tell me what happens....

phreneticus

jesus titty ****ing christ this netopia router sucks durty aule man cock, i can't get port forwarding to work - there's no option to input a static IP when trying to set up a pinhole, or port-forwarding. Anyone got any tips, i'm trying to get it to work with utorrent - the damn thing never downloads faster than 6Kbps, i've tried azureus but to no avail. I'm presuming zonealarm isn't helping things either - it's generally a bit overly zealous in blocking things. Can't find any option in it though to help me out - there's no magic "fix utorrent" button in there. Sigh.

8T8

phreneticus wrote:

jesus titty ****ing christ this netopia router sucks durty aule man cock, i can't get port forwarding to work - there's no option to input a static IP when trying to set up a pinhole, or port-forwarding. Anyone got any tips, i'm trying to get it to work with utorrent - the damn thing never downloads faster than 6Kbps, i've tried azureus but to no avail. I'm presuming zonealarm isn't helping things either - it's generally a bit overly zealous in blocking things. Can't find any option in it though to help me out - there's no magic "fix utorrent" button in there. Sigh.

First off I would suggest you read my previous post in this thread but yes it seems you are correct in that certain Netopia's do not permit which IP address can be used for port forwarding I suspect it may forward the ports for any IP that is connected to it. However I do not have one to hand I am merely speculating.

I suggest you seek out the UPnP option on the router and enable it this will allow you to forgo having to fiddle with port forwarding. Inside uTorrent's options menu you will find an option to enable UPnP support tick the box if it is not already done.

As for the poor speed well like I said the netopia routers aren't terribly good to begin with with the NAT problems resolved courtesy of UPnP if the speed problems persist you could try updating the firmware of the router or lower the number of active connections permitted in uTorrent.

Zonealarm can be done away with, it does interfere somewhat with Bittorrent but it is an unnecessary program with a NAT capable router and the built in WinXP firewall you are perfectly safe.

To cleanly remove Zonealarm do the following;

Go into the start menu and the zonelabs entry and right click on the uninstaller and select properties. Now in the target box you must add a space and then /clean to the end so that it looks something like this "C:\Program Files\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm\zauninst.exe" /clean click apply and then OK. Next open ZA and turn off the load on boot option, then reboot and then run the uninstaller.This should get rid of all of ZoneAlarm.

SeanW

#Elites wrote:

well its true, portforward IS ALL YOU NEED, the netopia router is listed, and all you do is choose your torrent program and it tell you how to do it with the router

No it's not. It is always possible that the router isn't up to the job. That happened to me when I wanted to run some services from my machine.

I had to force my router to go into bridge mode and act as a modem for such services to work.

If nothing else works, the OP may need to do likewise.

I wouln't necessarily advocated getting rid of ZoneAlarm, but it can be ditched temporarily for testing purposes.

easy_as_easy

As well as portwarding and setting the netopia firewall to low download and run this and change 50 to 100.

then your flying.

DemonOfTheFall

SeanW wrote:

No it's not. It is always possible that the router isn't up to the job. That happened to me when I wanted to run some services from my machine.

I had to force my router to go into bridge mode and act as a modem for such services to work.

If nothing else works, the OP may need to do likewise.

I wouln't necessarily advocated getting rid of ZoneAlarm, but it can be ditched temporarily for testing purposes.

Actually it's the same netopia router that thousands of other irish eircom BB users use with torrents just fine.

Update the firmware to a newer one and all will be well. Replaces the hideous interface with the one that the nice eircome wireless netopia uses.

SouperComputer

also, be sure that the upload for your BT client is less than the Max for your connection. TCP\IP requires a smaller packet to be send to confirm the receipt of one. If you upload is maxed, its bad news. Knock 20% off and dont be too surprised if your DL speeds get a bit better.

zilog_jones

Good luck with this. Those Netopia routers really do my head in...

chump

bishopLEN wrote:

Set the Netopia firewall to low if it still doesn't work, also chage the Azureus port number to something random. Restart Azureus.

Tell me what happens....

I had all sorts of trouble with this, followed every guide, but it was setting the firewall to low that eventually allowd me pass this test:
http://btfaq.com/natcheck.pl

phreneticus

8T8 wrote:

First off I would suggest you read my previous post in this thread but yes it seems you are correct in that certain Netopia's do not permit which IP address can be used for port forwarding I suspect it may forward the ports for any IP that is connected to it. However I do not have one to hand I am merely speculating.

I suggest you seek out the UPnP option on the router and enable it this will allow you to forgo having to fiddle with port forwarding. Inside uTorrent's options menu you will find an option to enable UPnP support tick the box if it is not already done.

As for the poor speed well like I said the netopia routers aren't terribly good to begin with with the NAT problems resolved courtesy of UPnP if the speed problems persist you could try updating the firmware of the router or lower the number of active connections permitted in uTorrent.

Zonealarm can be done away with, it does interfere somewhat with Bittorrent but it is an unnecessary program with a NAT capable router and the built in WinXP firewall you are perfectly safe.

To cleanly remove Zonealarm do the following;

Everything is A-OK. After enabling port forwarding (without a static IP address specified) and adding a new rule for said port to zonealarm utorrent is zipping along at a lovely 100kbps (total, from a number of torrents, each avering anywhere from 20-50kpbs). WAHAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!