Embedded tracker only seeds to LAN clients

Linux specific questions, problems.
Post Reply
diluvio

Embedded tracker only seeds to LAN clients

Post by diluvio »

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:

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)
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
Screenshot 2020-12-04 153630.png
Screenshot 2020-12-04 153630.png (8.48 KiB) Viewed 2267 times
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!
User avatar
Peter
Administrator
Administrator
Posts: 2693
Joined: Wed Jul 07, 2010 6:14 pm

Re: Embedded tracker only seeds to LAN clients

Post by Peter »

It could be your company's firewall, yeah. It seems like the tracker is working, so that gets through. But the firewall is blocking torrent traffic?
Like, it's not even a bad idea to have this all run from the VPN only, that's just way safer. So I'd just leave it like this to be honest.
diluvio

Re: Embedded tracker only seeds to LAN clients

Post by diluvio »

Thanks for the feedback and sorry for my delayed reply. My sense was that the firewall was indeed blocking torrent traffic somehow but aside from the tracker port and the listening port for incoming connections, is there some other port that is used for torrent traffic? My other guess is that the firewall is not allowing bidirectional traffic on these ports.

Keeping the VPN in place does sound reasonable but we're concerned about not having access to our full bandwidth and client sessions needing to be supervised to avoid hitting their time limits and terminating.

Thanks!
Post Reply