openSUSE 13.1 64bit KDE
As of last night I am unable to download anything via ktorrent. I wanted to download the 13.1 DVD and the tracker never connects. I tried other torrent links. All failed in the same way. I thought it might be my ISP here in Sweden, but then I tried via a VPN in Germany, Romania and Switzerland. Is anyone else having similar problems?
Thanks in advance.
With “other torrent links” do you mean on the same (openSUSE) site or on not SUSE related sites? In other words, is your complaint about the openSUSE download sit being broken, or about Ktorrent not functioning at all?
No I do not believe there is any problem with the openSUSE site. I tried several non-openSUSE sites with the same results. I thought that perhaps my ISP was blocking access to any address that had “tracker” in the name, but I got the same results connecting through a VPN. Using both methods I could connect to normal sites such as bbc.com and nytimes.com. I am waiting for my ISP to call back on the telephone.
Do you know whether you can contact the tracker?
Extract (or view) the tracker URL in the torrent file, then paste that URL into a web browser (complete with specified port number).
Or, telnet the tracker.
That’s the first step to getting a torrent going (aside from relying on DHT or Peer discovery, but the tracker will always be the fastest, most reliable method).
Once you’ve verified connectivity to the Tracker,
You should then look to see if a list of peers appears in your Torrent app.
Most will start off disconnected but over time (typically over 5 minutes) you should establish connections with some of those peers. If that doesn’t happen, then you should check your FW for both outbound (critical) and inbound (highly advisable) open ports. If you still cannot connect, then you need to try other torrents and apps to detect a pattern.
Lastly, if you do a lot of torrent downloading and want to maximize speed, you should seriously consider making the modifications I describe here, I describe a number of things to do, all very important including
TSU
Thanks for the suggestions which I will follow.
My ISP customer service called back and confirmed that they were not blocking torrents, but that they were having some “technical problems”. Then he asked me a number of questions on how my torrent client was configured including what port number it was using. About twenty minutes after the call was over ktorrent started to work again. I suppose it was divine intervention but I am functional again. I don’t use torrents much. I was just a little concerned at being filtered or spied on.
I doubt the divine intervention. Just an ISP where people do not bother to say: “Thank you for reporting this to us, we were able to correct this, sorry for the inconvenience”. Just my personal idea, which I can of course not prove.
They may not be blocking torrents.
But, a lot of ISPs are <very> much interested in knowing more about what is being transferred using the torrent protocol, so they might be inspecting your traffic deeply.
And, any time someone is taking a closer look at what is going on, if it’s not planned and executed well you can often see abnormally high latency which at its worst looks like blocking.
TSU