Netgear WNR854T and uTorrent - a real headscratcher...

[PeeBee]

This morning I installed a WNR854T gigabit router and threw out my old WPN824, and logged in to configure. A very anti-climactic experience (only Netgear can manage to NOT update the interface or add a single feature in 3+ years...) On a positive note, my internet connection is smokin'! I'm now getting about 80% out of my 100 MBit connection, compared to 20-25% with the WPN824.

Now, the problem: I use my laptop either docked or undocked. When docked, I use the wired connection, when undocked it's wireless. I prefer wired - even if draft N is fast, it just can't compete with wired gigabit.

Now, uTorrent needs an open port. It can be fixed or random. Since my laptop will have different IP numbers depending on whether I'm using wired or wireless, port forwarding sucks because I have to edit the configuration each time I dock/undock. And I can't create two rules for forwarding the same port to different IP numbers.

I'd prefer using port triggering, since this is IP number independent, but I guess that's not going to work?

To make matters worse, port forwarding doesn't even work on the WNR854T (I use the exact same settings as on the other Netgear router I retired this morning) - uTorrent gives me a red exclamation mark.

Summary: What I want is a green light in uTorrent, regardless of local IP number on my laptop and without having to fiddle with the configuration each time I dock or undock.

[DreadWingKnight]

Port triggering simply doesn't work since it relies on you connecting out to a known port (which can happen in BT swarms, but is becoming increasingly difficult to trigger).

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_routers lists several netgear routers.

I'm uncertain as to the UPnP support in the netgear routers, but you could try that as an option. You only need to restart uT when you switch to/from undocked

[PeeBee]

Thanks. After some experimentation with uPnP, I had partial success.

I failed to make the router listen to uTorrent's uPnP instructions (or rather, I failed to make Windows Vista forward them).

But: After enabling uPnP, the router would show up as a device in the Network explorer, and right-clicking on the router and selecting Properties allowed me to add uTorrent as a service.

I got a window called Service Settings with the following options:

"Description of service"

"Name or IP address of the computer hosting this service on your network"

"External Port number for this service, TCP/UDP"

"Internal Port number for this service"

Unfortunately the dumbass router would return an error to Windows if I entered my computer name as suggested, it would only accept an IP address, so the main problem remains -- I need this to be IP address independent, it must accept anything in the 192.168.1.X range because my laptop will switch between two IP addresses due to the dual network adapter thing. I can't even narrow it down to two different IP addresses, because this router doesn't allow multiple instances of the same computer name in the reservation table. This was possible on all my previous Netgear routers, but their latest and greatest won't allow it. Argh!