[jazzbo]

Originally Posted by Five

supposedly bitcomet tells his router somehow

this is not possible, is it?

(oh, and I told him to stop using bitcomet)

It is.

If you look at most consumer routers made in the last few years from major manufacturers, upnp support is fairly standard. The NAT transversal portion of upnp is designed to solve most of the problems of users having to manually forward ports. This is particularly useful if you assign IP by DHCP on your private network. Applications can then open ports without needing to hardcode a port forward to a specific IP at the router level.

My understanding is that Azureus also supports this feature.

Note that upnp arguably has some serious security issues -- basically it is an open interface that might allow a random piece of software to modify your router settings. Almost anything behind the router can make the change. For that reason most hardware comes out of the box with upnp support turned off.

upnp does a bunch of other stuff that allow network devices to announce their presence, state capabilities, autojoin networks, etc.