Firewalled

[boneyard]

Can someone tell me why I now show up as firewalled? This started yesterday.
No changes have been made to my computer.
Been on the site for 10 years without a problem.
My port is shown as open at EL. And I don't appear to have problems at Dime.

[xavier242]

No changes have been made since August of 2022 that would affect your "connectable" status (how "firewalled" is defined in the database).

Something changed in the network routing between you and TTD. My former ISP (Verizon DSL and FIOS) somehow blocked the entire bittorrent protocol and I was firewalled to all sites. My current ISP (Spectrum aka Road Runner) doesn't block it in my area. However, I read that others areas are blocked. After I found out that governments around the world are saving every byte of data you transfer for analysis, I got decent VPN service. I read that the gov't is just storing the data for now and are developing AIs to analyze it at some point. It's far too much raw data for humans to analyze.

Anyway... search OVPN. My friend tells me they are a good VPN provider and lets you bypass ISP blocking and stop gov't spying for $5/month (I pay $12/mo the one I have now).

[guesswho1280]

I've had similar issues where it says I am firewalled. I opened the necessary ports on my laptop and router, canyouseeme.org sees my uTorrent port is open, but not the default BitTorrent ports (6881-6889). I think I am blocked by my ISP as well. I tried oVPN, but I was surprised, as it does not resolve the firewall issue. I have noticed that I am able to seed successfully, so as the help articles have stated, it must be only those that aren't firewalled that can leech from me. Any other suggestions to try are welcome.

[magpiepie]

Lol I'm not firewalled now after being firewalled since joining, go figure

[xavier242]

Originally Posted by guesswho1280

...I tried oVPN, but I was surprised, as it does not resolve the firewall issue. I have noticed that I am able to seed successfully, so as the help articles have stated, it must be only those that aren't firewalled that can leech from me. Any other suggestions to try are welcome.

It's possible you are firewalled to TTD but not to some users. IVPN is firewalled on some of their VPN servers for the past 2 days. My connection through Serbia is good but several other countries are blocked. My friend says OVPN is ok for the moment. If you still have OVPN, try some different servers.

[xavier242]

I'm beginning to think our hosting provider has some issues with some of the routes folks' connectable pings take to connect to TTD. Which means TTD will think you are firewalled when if fact you are not (to other peers).

This would explain why I and others can download a gig when all peers show as firewalled on TTD.

It would be nice if the bittorrent protocol could report who a peer can connect to and relay this back to the tracker to be displayed in the peers list (and seeder counts). But AFAIK the protocol has no means to report connectivity with other peers back to the tracker.

The Seeding Opportunities page and all other torrents.php generated pages now consider your connectable status (to TTD) when generating the page. Which means the current and previous version are not quite accurate with who's really firewalled because of the inaccurate connectable status data. The same goes for the the rest of the peers data on the site which is using the prior torrents.php logic which relies on all seeders being connectable to be accurate.

IVPN has not improved any. In fact is seems to be getting worse. Now some servers outside the US report me as being firewalled, however I can download just fine. It's madness. I'm going to research the bittorrent peer info relay idea and see if anyone else concluded the same and if any fix exists. Maybe there is one and it's how some other torrent sites report accurate firewalled status.

TLDR:
Take the TTD firewalled stats with a grain of salt.

[xavier242]

Originally Posted by xavier242

It would be nice if the bittorrent protocol could report who a peer can connect to and relay this back to the tracker to be displayed in the peers list (and seeder counts). But AFAIK the protocol has no means to report connectivity with other peers back to the tracker.

The Seeding Opportunities page and all other torrents.php generated pages now consider your connectable status (to TTD) when generating the page. Which means the current and previous version are not quite accurate with who's really firewalled because of the inaccurate connectable status data. The same goes for the the rest of the peers data on the site which is using the prior torrents.php logic which relies on all seeders being connectable to be accurate.

...I'm going to research the bittorrent peer info relay idea and see if anyone else concluded the same and if any fix exists. Maybe there is one and it's how some other torrent sites report accurate firewalled status.

I found the official bittorrent spec and studied it. There is no provision for querying the other peers status from each peer.

But I came up with an alternate idea to get an accurate firewalled status to be reported on TTD:

Create an app that runs on a PC with a different VPN server for each PC. That app would periodically download the peers table from the TTD database querying a list of userids and their IPs and ports to test periodically. It would report back to TTD those peers who are connectable and willing to seed from the app's VPN perspective.

There would be maybe 10 to 20 of these boxes running the app and reporting their data. If a peer is not connectable (or willing to seed) from any of the boxes, a reasonable conclusion would be that that peer is truly firewalled. If any peer is connectable and can seed from at least one of the app boxes, they would be considered a usable connectable seeder (not firewalled).

This would be reported to the TTD server and tallied in the peers database (where each peers' connectable status lives). In theory the TTD database would then have a fairly accurate count of who can seed to others.

Now the question is how to design the app for each box. And the design of the php page on TTD to report and tally the findings.

There's a concern of how much load this would put on TTD's server.

The bittorrent spec has different states a peer can be in that also determine if they will seed. That also needs to be reported and tallied.

You'd want to run each box on a VPN as the ISP would throw a fit with all the different IPs passing metadata around. Even some VPN companies might take issue with that, even though the total amount of data is small compared to a gig download.

My head is spinning... maybe there's a better idea.

TLDR:
Theoretically there is a solution for accurately reporting who's really firewalled.

[michaelmee]

Originally Posted by boneyard

Can someone tell me why I now show up as firewalled? This started yesterday.
No changes have been made to my computer.
Been on the site for 10 years without a problem.
My port is shown as open at EL. And I don't appear to have problems at Dime.

same problem here....I suddenly find myself firewalled here but on Dime it's not...yikes !

[acetboy]

I've never been firewalled on TD. I am now. Nothing's changed on my end.
I do not show firewalled on any other sites.

And it used to be that I would immediately share back 100% easily.
Now I can never share back hardly anything.

Guess my ratio will go to hell. If I get kicked off, whatever.....

[bobbydjr]

Originally Posted by acetboy

I've never been firewalled on TD. I am now. Nothing's changed on my end.
I do not show firewalled on any other sites.

And it used to be that I would immediately share back 100% easily.
Now I can never share back hardly anything.

Same here. I'm not firewalled on any other sites I use and my up speeds are good with them all. It's just TTD that this is happening.

[xavier242]

Originally Posted by acetboy

I've never been firewalled on TD. I am now. Nothing's changed on my end.
I do not show firewalled on any other sites.

And it used to be that I would immediately share back 100% easily.
Now I can never share back hardly anything.

Guess my ratio will go to hell. If I get kicked off, whatever.....

If it was within any of the TTD staffs' abilities, we would improve your connectivity. No one is firewalling you purposely (except the ISPs). Read my posts above to fully understand what your firewalled status means- the stats are not accurate and can't be without a complex solution like I proposed.

The ratio here is an honor system. Aim for 4:1 if you can seed, otherwise don't worry about it. No one has ever been banned from TTD for a poor ratio.