BitTorrent

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file transfer protocol. It depends upon the clients to distribute the files, so there’s no server bottleneck. I’ve used the original in years past, but for kicks tried Azureus, a Java implementation.

Regardless of client, BitTorrent by default listens on a port in the range 6881 to 6889. These are tried in order and 6881 will be used unless it can’t bind to it. Of course, my default firewall setup was blocking it. To fix that, I defined the BitTorrent ports in /etc/services:

bittorrent_min 6881/tcp

bittorrent_max 6889/tcp


and added this rule to the firewall:

$IPTABLES -A INPUT -i $OUTSIDE -d 0/0 -p tcp --dport bittorrent_min:bittorrent_max -j ACCEPT