Embedded tracker only seeds to LAN clients
Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2020 10:55 pm
I've configured qBitTorrent v4.2.5 on a dedicated Ubuntu 20.04 server to operate as a private tracker for my company using the guides on LifeHacker: How to Create a Super Private BitTorrent Community for You and Your Friends and GitHub: How to use qBittorrent as a tracker. However, when I load a torrent file created by this server onto other clients, no transfer takes place unless the client is on the company LAN, either physically or remotely over a VPN connection.
My first thought is that some port is not traversing our firewall for external connections so I checked open ports that qBitTorrent is listening on with the following command and output:
This jibes with the ports that I've configured on qBitTorrent: 49901 (static) as the listening port and 9000 (default) for the tracker. I've created two firewall NAT policies to forward traffic from two public IPs to each port on this server and successfully tested the policies with an online port scanner.
On my external client, I am able to load a torrent file from the server and observe that both tracker addresses show a "Working" status Despite this, no download begins. When I log into my company VPN, however, my computer is granted an IP address on the same LAN as the server and BAM!, the download begins right in away.
What might be the cause for this behavior? Is this a server/firewall configuration problem or do our external clients need to have some additional tweaking in order to play nice with qBitTorrent's embedded tracker?
Thanks!
My first thought is that some port is not traversing our firewall for external connections so I checked open ports that qBitTorrent is listening on with the following command and output:
Code: Select all
[username]@diluvio:~$ sudo lsof -i -P -n | egrep "*qbit.*TCP.*LISTEN"
qbittorre 2633 [username] 23u IPv4 41419 0t0 TCP 127.0.0.1:49901 (LISTEN)
qbittorre 2633 [username] 25u IPv4 41422 0t0 TCP xxx.xxx.xxx.67:49901 (LISTEN)
qbittorre 2633 [username] 27u IPv6 41425 0t0 TCP [::1]:49901 (LISTEN)
qbittorre 2633 [username] 28u IPv6 40836 0t0 TCP *:9000 (LISTEN)
qbittorre 2633 [username] 30u IPv6 41432 0t0 TCP [xxxx::xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:6bfa]:49901 (LISTEN)
On my external client, I am able to load a torrent file from the server and observe that both tracker addresses show a "Working" status Despite this, no download begins. When I log into my company VPN, however, my computer is granted an IP address on the same LAN as the server and BAM!, the download begins right in away.
What might be the cause for this behavior? Is this a server/firewall configuration problem or do our external clients need to have some additional tweaking in order to play nice with qBitTorrent's embedded tracker?
Thanks!