2008-02-29
This tutorial or guide is a translation of Azureus Port forwarding web page.
Yellow Smileys
Smiley faces provide info on your torrents. The yellow smiley indicates that while your system can initiate connections with other peers (known as local connections, or L in the torrent's "Details" tab), you cannot receive connections initiated from other peers (known as remote connections, or R). This is almost certainly caused by incorrectly forwarded ports from your router or firewall. You can see the L's and R's in the Details tab of your individual torrent. If you see only L's, you probably have a Port Forwarding problem. Green smileys mean that you have both L and R connections to peers and are connected to the tracker. For more information on what every smiley means, click Help gt; About Health.
There are other possible causes for a yellow smiley. If you see a green smiley or have seen one with the same router/firewall configuration, then port forwarding may not be the culprit. Run the Tools gt; NAT/Firewall test.
Ports
When you connect to the internet, there are different channels that data travel by. Computers usually handle this perfectly in the background via ports, identified by numbers. For example, MSN protocol usually uses ports 6891-6900. Please see PortIsBlacklisted now for which ports to use. Check out Tantalo or Wikipedia to find out more about ports.
Azureus listens to one port for torrents and another for the embedded tracker. Two protocols, TCP and UDP, use the same port, unless specified otherwise. Thus, you need to forward one listening port for Azureus and tick both the TCP and the UDP boxes, or make an extra rule, one for each protocol.
The only time you will notice the ports is when they are closed; no data is transmitted and you get error messages like "NAT Error." This usually happen because of firewalls and routers.
NAT
NAT stands for Network Address Translation. The network, which includes your router and computer, needs to translate the Internet Protocol address of your router (with its own IP address) to and from the IP address of your computer (with its own IP address). The router directs traffic to different computers connected to it and can be configured to protect you from specified traffic. It can use port forwarding to redirect data packets to a different address. The address known by the outside world (Wider Area Network, or WAN) is the IP address of your router, which redirects packets according to your instructions to your Local Area Network