NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

I'm a BitTorrent user (BitTorrent is a P2P program for those who don't know what it is). In the last few days my BitTorrent download speed has gone down dramatically (I'm on the 600k package). After a bit of investigation I discovered the abysmall download speed was due to incoming connections from peers being refused (because somehow ports 6881 to 6889 were blocked). I initially thought I had misconfigured my software Firewall ZoneAlarm but it turns out the problem still exists even when ZoneAlarm is not running.
As I used to be able to accept incoming peer connections I can only deduct NTL has recently decided to block ports 6881 to 6889 to prevent users from achieving proper download speed with BitTorrent.

Has anyone else noticed this problem? Can anyone confirm those ports are indeed blocked by NTL, and can we ever expect these to be unblocked?

Re: NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

i too have experianced a slower to zero download speed thats without upload saturation i do get connection refused errors sometimes

Re: NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

I've not had any problems with it.

Re: NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

LOL, another one.

NTL are not blocking any ports other than the ones listed in thier original article, but just to allay your fears I have just spent nearly 15 mins testing the ports you mention both in and out of the NTL network [to various other networks I have access to] and they all work perfectly.

FYI - ZA has a habit of screwing your network even when you think it is turned off (even when you think you have uninstalled it !!).

Re: NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

Someone owes ntl an apology.

(curse my poor spelling)

Re: NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

Had no problems at all with using bittorrent sites and I also use Zone Alarm.

Re: NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

Agreed. I've had to reinstall windows before now just to get networking working again. Although, to be fair, I suspect this has more to do with windows being a bag of s***e than zone alarm (as i understand it, za has to plug into windows at a lower level than apps are supposed to just to provide the functionality that should be provided as standard by ms)

Re: NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

Yep,
check this out for how to un-install ZA properly
http://andras.net/router_aw/router_aw.html#UNZAP

Re: NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

Dont use Zonealarm, its famous for doing that, its done that every time ive ever installed it, its worked fin for a few weeks then bang, my internet would behave poorly.

I use Sygate Personal Firewall now and ive never had a problem with that. Touch Wood

Re: NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

As I said before, no probs with ZA here, so my philosphy is "If it aint broke, don't fix it" :D

Re: NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

Thanks for the replies. I'm more than willing to accept the problem is due to some software misconfigurations rather than NTL's fault. I'll try uninstalling ZoneAlarm completely to see if this fixes the problem. Note that BitTorrent *is* working though, it's just the D/L speed that's suffering due to peers being unable to connect.
The BitTorrent client at http://bt.degreez.net/ tells you when you're not accepting peer connections by switching the status LED colour to yellow (instead of green).

Re: NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

I'm currently using Azureus.

Re: NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

Excellent BT program, SuperCow, Azureus allows you to configure which ports that you want BT to use for incoming connections.

Re: NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

Out of Interest Supercow - what routers/pop site are you going through? you can find this out by running a trace and finding out what the router called xxxx-t2core-a...blah...blah or xxxx-t2core-b..blah..blah

Re: NTL blocking BitTorrent ports? (6881 to 6889)
 

I resolved the problem btw - it was due to user incompetence!
With all the recent DNS problems with NTL I had enabled a transparent cache in the proxy server settings and "forgot" it was there. Having a proxy server set up was causing incoming BitTorrent connections to be refused. I had read that some ISPs were blocking ports used in some P2P programs so I jumped the gun and wrongly assumed poor'ol NTL was doing this!
Thanks for all the help.