1.6.1 sending 62byte packets and flooding my local network

[rgjoyce]

I am living in an area where the apartment buildings have a network between them and we have our own vpn connection to the internet.

The administrator called me last ight and said that the torrent program I am using has a fault in that it is flooding the network with 62byte packets.

I installed a firewall program to see this and he was right.

The torrent program is sending a HUGE number of 62 byte packets to random IP addresses and ports within my local networks.

Well this morning I woke to found that they'd banned me from the network until this was fixed.

I'd like to attach an image but it doesn't look like I can.

I'll try to send a URL to the output from my firewall log.

http://www.osdcs.com/bad_packets.JPG

The red are the bad packets and the green shows my selected port.

Why its trying to transmit on ports other that what I selected should be another bug.

[Switeck]

The firewall screenshot shows working-as-design behavior.

Your µTorrent is trying to connect to other seeds+peers on the same torrent, attempting ips+ports given to it by the tracker and working seeds+peers. Most don't reply because they're firewalled or disconnected.

The OUTGOING port varies because only the incoming port is fixed. Outgoing packets are supposed to use the ephemeral port range which is roughly ports 1000-5000. There is an advanced feature to lock the outgoing port, but it has serious problems if you need UPnP to get unfirewalled.

You can vastly reduce the number of outgoing connection attempts by reducing µTorrent's advanced setting net.max_halfopen as low as 1. That's roughly how many ip connections µTorrent will be trying at any given moment.

Also, disable DHT if you haven't already. It generates lots of UDP packets, which tends to kill many low-end (read Belkin!) consumer routers.

Your upload and download speed max should be kept reasonable too. While you may be able to upload+download pretty fast, your administrator may get VERY mad at you if you sustain that for hours/days on end. As a shared connection, people may be allowed to use a large fraction of the whole on the assumption that they're only doing it for a few minutes on end (such as downloading a 100 MB file.)

Lastly, how many total connections are you allowing at once in µTorrent?

This is the Global max and per-torrent max under BitTorrent window in Preferences.

With the restrictions put on you by your admin, you certainly should use lower values than you might otherwise.