red arrows, socket operation failed, green icon and no download

[theonlybigg]

my utorrent has been working great for many months. now suddenly a couple weeks ago it became incredibly slow. at first the icon at the bottom would stay yellow, i managed to update to 1.8.2 and now that turns green. however all my downloads have the red arrow (had this with 1.8.1 as well) and the trackers say " a socket operation was attempted to an unreachable network". it shows all my torrents have 0 seeds. once in a while a torrent will start (only 1) and download at an ok speed but the arrow still remains red. no multiple downloads. even in the one thats downloading tracker says "a socket operation was attempted to an unreachable network".

things to note:

i didnt change any settings on my computer

my modem got turned off by mistake and i had to restart it. however utorrent was already messed up before that

i am in china which blocks thepiratebay. however i have downloaded from here for many month even though it was blocked

might it have something to do with china blocking youtube? youtube got blocked a couple weeks ago and my utorrent stopped working sometime around then. did they block some other stuff as well? like some trackers?

please somebody help!!

i dunno whats wrong and i really want to fix this!

thank you

[moogly]

Can you test with a torrent from OO? http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/

Choose a random one like Win/OO3.0.1/En.

[theonlybigg]

wow amazing it works! so does this mean china blocked thepiratebay tracker? is there anything i can do about it? i always go on thepiratebay using the proxy zend2.com. i noticed in utorrent i can select to use a proxy. would this help? and how do you use this?

thanks for your help

[moogly]

Yes you can. Go to Preferences > Connection and use proxy function.

Anyway don't check the box about "use proxy server for p2p connections" because the proxy will be surely not designed for that. Anyway uT will proxify the connections with the tracker (your goal).

Use proxy server for peer-to-peer connections forces µTorrent to communicate and transfer data with peers through the proxy. By default, this option is disabled, and µTorrent only uses the proxy to communicate with trackers.

[theonlybigg]

thanks for your help. but so far i've had no luck. i've tried several proxies and they all say "proxy connect error: a socket operation was attempted to an unreachable network"

what to do?

[moogly]

Can you try with these ones (HTTP proxy), they work with my web browser (Firefox):

213.133.123.59:80 anonymous proxy Germany

89.206.25.99:3128 anonymous proxy Poland

203.26.91.139:8080 Australia

[theonlybigg]

thanks for answering again. utorrent says "connection closed by peer". does it matter what port i use? and do the proxies have to be in those numbers or can i use any normal www. proxy?

[moogly]

They are HTTP proxies (choose this option in uT), the number after ":" is the port (of course remove the :#port when you enter the proxy into uT)

They can work with your web browsers, I tested them with Firefox 3.0.9.

Anyway it's possible that's not a problem with a suspicous filtering of China. It can be the case if your firewall is bad configured or if you have a problem with your internet connection.

So check uT is added in firewall exceptions, check the port forwarding rules etc...