TOT or Transmission - port closed after a few hours

[AyG]

For the past couple of weeks I've found that after running Transmission for a few hours the listening port changes status from "open" to "closed". I'm not sure whether this is caused by a bug in Transmission (I recently upgraded to 2.80, then 2.81 in about this timescale) or whether it's TOT monitoring Internet activity and deciding to block an active port after a certain amount of usage.

Has anybody else experienced the same thing/know what the problem is?

This is running Transmission under Linux Mint 15 (Olivia) with Cinnamon.

Thanks

[doctormann]

Just a suggestion - have you forwarded your listening port for Transmission?

If you haven't done this then every time your DHCP renews your lease you may get a different LAN IP address allocated, in which case your port will likely not be open. You should really assign either a static or reserved LAN IP and associate this with the port that you use for Transmission.

Note that we are talking about the IP address that your router allocates to your local machine, not the WAN IP address that is provided by your ISP - that is something different, over which you don't normally have any control.

If you are not familiar with Port Forwarding you should maybe look at portforward.com - info. on how to forward ports on just about any router is on that site.

I'm assuming that you have an ADSL connection by the way - if you are on cable then things are probably different.

DM

[AyG]

Yup. Port is forwarded. I also use a static IP address for my PC on my LAN.

And yes, it's an ADSL connection.

What I'm finding weird is that it works OK for a few hours and then stops working.

If others are having the same problem with TOT but are using different clients, that would suggest that it's TOT doing the blocking.

If others using Transmission, but different network providers have problems, that would point to Transmission.

At the moment, my money is on this being a Transmission bug introduced in version 2.80, a version which in many ways is a long step backwards from 2.7x. Searching for reports of a similar issue, however, yields nothing.

[doctormann]

Yup. Port is forwarded. I also use a static IP address for my PC on my LAN.

And yes, it's an ADSL connection.

What I'm finding weird is that it works OK for a few hours and then stops working.

If others are having the same problem with TOT but are using different clients, that would suggest that it's TOT doing the blocking.

If others using Transmission, but different network providers have problems, that would point to Transmission.

At the moment, my money is on this being a Transmission bug introduced in version 2.80, a version which in many ways is a long step backwards from 2.7x. Searching for reports of a similar issue, however, yields nothing.

I am using Transmission and I'm on a ToT 10/512 connection. I don't see the problem that you're encountering but I'm still on V 2.51 so I'm a little behind the times.

Perhaps you could remove your current version of Transmission and re-install an older version. Maybe take a look here http://www.transmissionbt.com/download/ - there are some older versions for most flavours of Linux on there.

DM

[AyG]

Good suggestion. Thanks. I've downgraded to 2.77 and will see what happens.

[AyG]

Downgrading Transmission wasn't successful. The older packages I tried all installed the latest version of the daemon, so that was inconclusive.

I eventually installed Deluge as an alternative to Transmission, and am getting exactly the same behaviour: after uploading about 2 GB of data the port is closed. I reckon that's pretty conclusive evidence that TOT is monitoring data transfers and blocking certain ports once a download threshold is passed.

All I need to work out now is how to overcome this TOT blocking. (Switching to another provider unfortunately isn't an option - only TOT provides ADSL in my moobaan - not that any other provider is likely to be much better.)

[pancakeman]

You could setup your torrent client to randomize the port and automatically restart after N minutes: http://filesharefreak.com/2008/12/13/fight-throttling-auto-restart-utorrent-with-random-ports

[schondie]

I had a similar problem with TOT a few months ago, as soon as Transmission connected with the swarm the speed just died. For one minute I was getting a DL speed of 500 kbps and within a minute I'd be lucky to get 20kbps. I never changed from Transmission and one day TOT must have mistakenly stopped throttling my downloads.

Not much choice for me either, TOT or nothing. The wife just reminded me that she told them we'd switch ISPs (a blatant lie as we have no choice) but suddenly we were downloading at 1mb/s on popular torrents.

Give it a month or so and see what happens. We had an awful wait for the latest episodes of Game of Thrones.

It could be a glitch in the system, wait and one day it could change. If not, go to TOT and explain that we have no choice and see if it stops being throttled.