Tracker Status "offline" - timed out

[aaronwestera]

I've been using utorrent for a long time now and have never had this problem until now. All my torrents have turned to red downloading arrows and won't connect to anyone. They're huge numbers of seeders and sometimes they connect but most times they don't. The tracker status says I'm "timed out". I read another post like this but can't make heads or tails of it all cause I'm not a computer programer or anything. Can anyone tell me in basic steps how go about fixing this?

[DreadWingKnight]

http://opensource.depthstrike.com/openoffice/ <-- do these torrents give the same behavior?

[aaronwestera]

Ya I just tried those torrents and they have the same problem as well. The tracker still goes to offline "timed out" and I can't download them.

[alphastickmania]

Have you tried update trackers yet? If you had, it is possible the tracker doesn't support that torrent anymore or that server is down. It depends on whether how long this have been happening. Sometimes it can be an entire day that the tracker is down. It occasionally happens to me too.

[aaronwestera]

I tried the update tracker and it still does the same thing. I can understand if it can be the entire day or even acouple of days the tracker is down. This has been going on almost 2 weeks now so I don't think it's that... sometimes it connects I guess using DHT and downloads but the arrow is still red at that point. It also has like 0 (1493) peers and 0 (654) seeders.. which seems to be a lot of people have these torrents but they're just not connecting.

[amekokinki]

i have the same problem for about 2 weeks already...

anyone has the solution, please?

[DreadWingKnight]

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=18726

Looks like it's an ISP issue

[aaronwestera]

No... It's a problem with uTorrent. I just tried loading another torrent program to test it and it's working perfectly... actually faster than I've ever been getting with uTorrent. I don't like they layout near as much but I'd rather a program that works than looks nice. Thanks for the help but I'm going to stick with what works unless you know what the problem with uTorrent isand why just it wouldn't work?

[xaknafein]

As outlined here, http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=19187 , I also have a similar problem and have confirmed that it is NOT an ISP problem (other clients can use the torrents fine).

I would also prefer to use utorrent but I have to stick with what works.

[Ultima]

@aaronwestera: By not providing us with any relevant information, you're not giving anyone any room to help you in the first place. Are we supposed to be playing guessing games to figure out what firewall, router, and modem you're using?

[creedo]

I got this problem too, and was able to fix it.

Basically all my torrents, a variety of them w/many different trackers, turned red and got timeouts on the trackers.

What probably caused it: I made some aggressive 'tweaks' to all my connection settings based on an online guide, allowing more connections and upload slots than utorrent's suggested numbers. After a while I started getting red arrows with 'out of buffer space' errors, then later the 'tracker offline' errors. I used to get the buffer space errors all the time on windows 98 with more than 2 torrents running. On XP though it seemed like I could run a dozen without problems, but not with these settings.

To fix it, I first changed the settings back using the utorrent speed guide (ctrl+G), but even after restarting utorrent it didn't work, so I rebooted. That worked. My arrows are all happy and green now.

Another possible problem is that I had recently installed a bit of software (poweriso if it matters) and ignored their recommendation to reboot at the end of the install. Maybe that was the real problem. Either way rebooting fixed it, but be careful to close utorrent properly and wait a second or it forgets your torrents (it doesn't lose any downloaded data, you just have to manually re-add the torrents. They'll probably be in c:\documents and settings\users\yourname\application data\utorrent\ )

[creedo]

zzz it turns out I didn't fix it, after a while the arrows all turned red again.

I also found that when I quit utorrent and then started it again, it "forgot" all my torrents every time.

I did a search and found a similar thread (there are actually lots of threads like this) and found out that the problem PROBABLY was that my TCPIP.sys became 'unpatched'. Not sure how that happened, I don't remember running any windows updates. Anyway you have to run this patch to make TCPIP happy: http://www.lvllord.de/ and then click no when windows freaks out about the changed system file.

Another possible cause of the problem is that my net_max_halfopen advanced setting got changed, and applying the utorrent defaults didn't change it back. To be absolutely sure, I removed my old utorrent, made backup copies of all the torrents in c:\documents and settings\users\yourname\application data\utorrent\ and reinstalled the program by deleting the old executable, deleting the utorrent folder in application data, then reinstalling from the site.

For the moment everything's green.

Moral of the story: don't f*ck with the utorrent settings, and trust its speed guide.

PS: possibly related, or not, I had installed and eventually uninstalled windowblinds, which just seemed to cause small problems everywhere, and when I next rebooted, scandisk came up with a lot of screwy files and warnings, including several for a specific torrent I'd downloaded. I let it do its thing and maybe that also helped.