[Ted]

Originally Posted by uhclem

I have recently discovered that if your router has UPnP capability, it is much better to turn that on and turn on Azureus' UPnP function, and don't bother forwarding any ports in your router. (You will still have to make sure that your WinXP firewall has an open port, however).

The reason UPnP is superior is that you don't have to mess around with port forwarding, and it's more secure than port forwarding because the ports are opened only by the application you want, and only when the application is running. Otherwise the port is closed.

I have the UPnP feature running on my router with both Azureus and BitTornado and it works great. Azureus was the easiest to deal with as it didn't require me to make any adjustments to my router (BitTornado did). You can see in the UPnP log that Azureus is using UPnP, and you can use the test feature to make sure that the port is open for Azureus. I got it working with BitTornado too, but it was a bit more tricky. But it was less work than port forwarding.

Sounds like a good recommendation. I'm still learning about the ins/outs of the security of UPnP, so I was hesitant to suggest it. I just gave the "tried and true" method I've used for so long.

@mike1061 - UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) basically opens/closes ports dynamically for you instead of having to manually forward them in a router, for example. It is said that it is more secure, but I don't know enough about it yet to confidently advise it, though MANY knowledgable people however, do. You need to have UPnP aware hardware (router) and also the software (Windows ME/XP). Despite what Steve Gibson (a moron) says, it is NOT a bad thing. If you've heard of him, he was saying (when XP was released) that it was a bad security risk without really understanding what it actually was and how it worked. The quick and dirty of how it works is that when a program (your bitorrent client for example) needs to access the internet, UPnP "senses" what port it needs and opens that port only for the amount of time necessary, then closes it again. Two services in XP are needed for it to operate. Steve Gibson was telling people to shut down those services and even wrote a little program to do it, but without those serives running, MSN Messanger wouldn't work under some circumstances and those people who stopped the services had no clue as to why, as did a lot of people trying to help them get MSN Messanger working again.

In the near future, I plan on playing around with it and learning more, but for now, I feel more comfortable in suggesting the alternative method of manually forwarding ports because I can help diagnose problems easier.