tracker ALWAYS down

[Player1]

its always offline(timed out).

i've been using utorrent for years. i've had slow downloads before and i managed to fix em with much help from this forums.

now though i've been getting tracker down for the last 5 days. the thing is, all trackers, from everywhere.

also, i read something like cannot connect because the target machine actively refused it.

my internet though is fine, as i can surf, download at my top speed, etc.

my connection is radio broadband. its been 1 year now so i know my broadband can use torrents, although i did not port forward anything.

so now i'm here to ask what i can do to fix this, if any, on my side, before i raise hell on my internet provider.

maybe they changed some settings on their side, i don't know, and even if i did know, i wouldn't be able to do anything about it(except raise hell). so i really am stuck to whatever options i may have (that i don't know yet) on my side.

any help and suggestion appreciated. please and thank you.

[jewelisheaven]

... have you followed the steps in the 2nd posat of Ultima's How-To? They include steps which limit the impact your torrenting will have on your hardware. Did you install the updates from the most recent "patch tuesday" over windows update? They included changes which would reset any changes you made to your tcpip.sys, and affect you if you had changed any of uT's Advanced settings... Have you changed any of them (you will see a * next to non-default values)?

I would also like to ask if the only message you are receiving is "Offline(Timeout)" aside from the connection refused message (some people still haven't heard demonoid was taken down I guess) it means your connection is being overloaded. If you are running ANYTHING more than 20 connections per torrent that is likely on most consumer-grade hardware. You can check your current settings and see recommended ones using the Speed Guide (Ctrl-G)... but if you were working previously I would exhaust those avenues stemming from the windows update first before mucking with your system.

[Player1]

i hate windows. windows did install something recently. damn updates. i was surprised as i heard my PC shut down suddenly (i was in the kitchen).

thank you.

after reading around, i read something about settings going bad. i wrote down my settings and deleted settings and settings.old.

after that so far everything seems normal.

i will look into Ultima's how to just in case.

EDIT: can you direct me to a thread regarding the recent patch Tuesday? i mean what did it affect(in terms of torrents)? just curious, as i wanna know about my system's settings and how i was affected and/or screwed over unintentionally, but screwed over nonetheless.

[jewelisheaven]

A cursory search online will bring up the abstract microsoft provides... because it appears to be directly related to tcpip.sys though I can only say it probably places more restrictive limits upon the networking stack. What this means for highly-network-intensive programs / protocols such as bittorrent ... perhaps more overhead, I don't know :/

[espanos]

Hi there. Would appreciate it if you could walk me through what changes to made to get utorrent back to normal. I am experiencing the exact same situation (everything has been fine for years but now all my torrents are constantly timed out, the arrows are all red (up and down) and am not connecting to as many seeds as usual).

I am port forwarding port 61234 (and have been since 2005) and the status is green to indicate the port is forwarded properly. Sorry to be a bother but would be grateful if you could explain the steps you took to do this:

Quoted from Player1's post

:after reading around, i read something about settings going bad. i wrote down my settings and deleted settings and settings.old.

after that so far everything seems normal.:

Which settings?

Thanks for your help...

[jewelisheaven]

your tcpip.sys was patched on Patch Tuesday. You should reduce your net.max_halfopen back to the default under Ctrl-P -> Advanced. You can then re-patch tcpip.sys. Unless of course you're overloading your upload with unlimited. In that case, use the Speed Guide to set it appropriately for your upload from a speed test?

Do you have any other questions?

[espanos]

Where do I find the net.max_halfopen? Is this a registry item? Also, how do I re-patch tcpip.sys?

(I have set the upload according to the results of the speedtest and have had no problems in the past. It is set at 12kbps).

Thanks.....

EDIT...

OK - Sorry for the silly question. I found net.max_open. It is set at "8". Should I set this to 50? Also, How can I ensure that tcpip.sys was, in fact patched?

I found this guide when searching for net.max_open which indicates where to re-patch tcpip.sys but not how to ensure that it was:

http://www.johntp.com/2006/04/19/how-to-increase-download-speeds-of-utorrent/

Options>Preferences>Advanced

net.max_halfopen: 50

If you use Windows XP SP2, patch tcpip.sys with LvlLord's Event ID 4226 Patcher to get better performance.

DO NOT CHANGE THIS OPTION unless you have Windows XP SP2 and have patched tcpip.sys.

You can also patch tcpip.sys with xp-Antispy--- end www.johntp.com

[jewelisheaven]

When you download the patch utility it tells you your current setting. If you are already at the default, a more likely problem is you are overloading your connection, then you are using incompatible software... but I didn't mention that before since you said you've been using uT already.

[espanos]

I installed the patch (it had been set to 10 connections), made the corresponding change in utorrent's net.max_halfopen (it is also 50 now), rebooted my computer and started everything up again and it appears to be downloading faster. Thank you for this advice.

However, the arrows indicated tracker condition are all still red. I am downloading from 3 different trackers - 2 public and 1 private - that I usually download from. The tracker is saying offline:timed out. Do you have any thoughts as to what I can do to get me trackers back online and to stop timing out?

Thanks again for all your attention to my problem.

[jewelisheaven]

If you had it working before, then no. If it was still finicky, you may have incompatible software which is interfering with the default operation of uT. Perhaps you are trying to overload your line? Generally speaking on anything BELOW xx/1Mbit 5 torrents is PLENTY for your connection and even then at really low peer loads.With your multiple trackers I can guess you're trying to seed on the private one, in which case you want to get this resolved as fast as possible. Are you running non-standard Queueing settings?