Constant incoming packets even with uTorrent closed.

[boccobrock]

a few days ago I started getting a constant stream of incoming traffic to my router headed for my computer on my p2p port. I've completed downloads before but nothing is currently being seeded or downloaded, and the traffic still comes without uTorrent open. My router is blocking the traffic, but i'm just wondering what might be the cause and any way to stop it?

ISP: Comcast

Router: Linksys BEFSR41

Standard settings in uTorrent

if any other info would be helpful please ask

thanks!

[thelittlefire]

You don't. Once you connect to torrents, your IP:PORT is in the wild. After a while it will stop.. depending on how large the swarms are/were when you were connected and how many swarms you connected to.

[Switeck]

Every recent torrent you've been running probably has peers and seeds that know your ip address and are retrying it occasionally (more than once a minute for the really annoying badly programmed BT clients).

[boccobrock]

Good to know, makes complete sense.

I was thinking that should be taken care of by the tracker, but sounds like not always.

Thanks for the info

[Switeck]

I think uTorrent may send a "goodbye" message to trackers when given a "graceful shutdown"...so the tracker doesn't continue handing out your ip address. But peers and seeds may already have your ip and pass it around via DHT and Peer Exchange. That doesn't explain "noisy" private torrents though, where DHT and Peer Exchange are disabled by default.

[hermanm]

If you have dynamic IP from your ISP, you could clone your router's MAC to something else. Release and renew your DHCP lease and you should be assigned a different IP address. You can just as easily change your Bittorrent port. While it can not stop incoming connection requests, these requests are ignored since no one is listening on that previous port.

[Ayush]

Even is a port is closed on a computer, connection request still comes, and the ISP charges on the volume of content downloaded, so useless connection request is something which we pay for even when we don't want to.

There must be someway to get rid of this annoying thing.

[Switeck]

Disable:

DHT, Local Peer Discovery, and Resolve IPs.

Having DHT enabled for awhile can VASTLY increase the amount of incoming packets when uTorrent is closed.

Local Peer Discovery broadcasts packets to everyone nearby to try to find "local" peers and seeds. Almost worthless unless you're on a giant WAN sharing the same internet gateway.

Resolve ips tries to show ISP and country locations of the peers and seeds you connect to. This is only for show and costs a little bandwidth to do it.

Peer Exchange reuses peer and seed connections, so you can leave it enabled. Peer Exchange only works while uTorrent is running a torrent and you're connected to peers and seeds anyway.