Portforwarding using MyWireless

D

dwd_za

Active Member
Joined
Jun 2, 2005
Messages
32
Reaction score
0
Hi All,

I am using BitTorrent client uTorrent, which I have used before and it worked, but now I am getting absolutely no download speed and an error saying:

"Checking port 41247 on 66.18.80.xxx" ERROR! Port 41247 does not appear to be open...

Does anyone know what I can do to get around this? It seems that Torrent is trying to receive incoming traffic but somewhere it is being blocked. Can someone please help me out here.. What do I do?

thanx
DWD
 
dwd_za... are you using a firewall?

make sure your firewall is set to allow access to the program and to the ports that is uses
 
Hi,

I have disabled firewall completely. Even tried it on a freshly loaded machine with nothing but OS, Sentech, and uTorrent same thing.

The fact that it gives me the IP Address 66.18.80.xxx means that it is being blocked at Sentech's servers. After all my network is on the 192.168.0.xxx range.

Any ideas?
 
Actually, Malware and Spyware are only likely to infect you based on your browser choice. A Firewall screens data coming in from mostly unknown ports and ports of known dangers but if the spyware decides to come in through IE (hence friendly port 80) then your firewall is about as good as a pony weilding a battleaxe.

I haven't used a firewall for the 2 years I've used firefox (becuase honestly, I think it's nothing but paranoia) and amazingly, I haven't recieved a virus or bit of spyware in those 2 years.

As for the port problem, just switch clients. Use Bitcomet and select a random port on startup and if worst comes to worst use HTTP-Tunnel to make a HTTP proxy and recieve the data that way.
 
Last edited:
Hi,

My firewall is up and running again. when I disabled my firewall, that was simply for testing purposes. I have quite a strict security regiment so I make sure nothing or nobody that I don't want in can get in.

As for BitComet. I'll give it a shot, but uTorrent offers random ports as well and that didn't seem to work. will try BitComet though and see. How do I setup HTTP tunneling?

thanx
 
First get the proggie from http://www.http-tunnel.com/html/solutions/http_tunnel/client.asp

Then (using free mode) just configure it and let it start up. Then in Bitcomet or whatever you're using simply put "localhost" as your http proxy address, 1080 as your proxy port and within moments you'll see HTTP-Tunnel working it's magic.

It's kinda slow on the free version but at least it should work.
 
Last edited:
dwd_za said:
Hi,

My firewall is up and running again. when I disabled my firewall, that was simply for testing purposes. I have quite a strict security regiment so I make sure nothing or nobody that I don't want in can get in.

As for BitComet. I'll give it a shot, but uTorrent offers random ports as well and that didn't seem to work. will try BitComet though and see. How do I setup HTTP tunneling?

thanx
Click to expand...

strange, i have utorrent and it runs well on my setup.
 
yes, it is very strange. It used to work but not anymore?

I will give Bitcomet a shot and if it doesn't work then will try the http-tunnel thing and let you know.. thanx
 
Hi,

Have tried BitComet, Have tried HTTP-Tunneling and stil the same. It is not on my local setup. It seems to be Sentech?
 
Basjohn said:
Actually, Malware and Spyware are only likely to infect you based on your browser choice. A Firewall screens data coming in from mostly unknown ports and ports of known dangers but if the spyware decides to come in through IE (hence friendly port 80) then your firewall is about as good as a pony weilding a battleaxe.

I haven't used a firewall for the 2 years I've used firefox (becuase honestly, I think it's nothing but paranoia) and amazingly, I haven't recieved a virus or bit of spyware in those 2 years.
Click to expand...

Ever heard of remote code execution? Perhaps you should follow the exploits relating to Windows. Many hackers, viruses can access your pc if its not protected by a firewall. There's a few articles on how long it takes for a default machine to be hacked and setup as a dummy bot machine. If I remember correctly, something in the region of a few minutes of being online.

A quick search returns this article:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/30/1932245&tid=220&tid=172&tid=201

"According to the latest study by USA Today and Avantgarde, it takes less than 4 minutes for an unpatched Windows XP SP1 system to become part of a botnet. Avantgarde has the statistics in their abstract. Stats of note: Although Macs and PC's got hit with equal opportunity, the XP SP1 machine was hit with 5 LSASS and 4 DCOM exploits while the Mac remained clean. The Linux desktop also was impenetrable, but only was only targeted by 0.26% of all attacks."


http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/17/1347214&tid=172

"The Internet Storm Center published a graph showing historic trends for the "Survival Time" of unpatched, unprotected (windows) computers connected to the internet. Turns out, this number dropped from about 40 minutes last year, to 20 minutes this year. The survival time is calculated as the average time between reports for an average target IP address. If you are assuming that most of these reports are generated by worms that attempt to propagate, an unpatched system would be infected by such a probe. The data is collected from a large number of networks with different types of upstream protection. So if you are on an unprotected cable/DSL line, you may see probes much more frequently. Either way, 20 minutes is not long enough to download patches. The Honeynet Project did publish a paper with some stats back in 2001."
 
Sp1 machines lad. Sp1.

If you're connected to the net and can't bother updating your machine, you can't really complain about new exploits can you?

Furthermore for code to be excuted it needs to actually see you. If this isn't done via the browser the attacker needs your ip address. Besides, an ATTACK is very different than a spyware INFECTION. Get me here?
 
Do you think SP2 doesnt have critical flaws?

Do you know how most attacks happen online? Do you think they sit there and go lets try work out what Basjohn's IP is? Oh come on. They mass scan and send the exploit. Worms work in the same way. CodeRed etc are classic examples of mass scanning and infecting the machines / servers. This is where the FIREWALL limits attacks. If setup correctly, it should block incoming ping requests, thus making you look like you dont exist. If they can ping you, they know you are there and will send the various exploit codes. If your patches are up to date, the exploits might not work... provided MS has actually released a working patch.

Firewalls, like ZoneAlarm for instance, also block outgoing traffic so if you did get spyware, it would not be able to connect to the internet to update or transfer data, unless you actually allow it to. Without the firewall... the spyware can connect as outgoing traffic and you wouldnt know you were infected until one of the antivirus products picked it up. By that time, you may have already sent out 1000's of spam messages or been used in other online attacks.

But they again... you knew all of this and trust MS to protect you.

PS. Do you by any chance work for telkom and think they offer cheap internet as well ?
 
Ouch Lad, I suppose your insults make you correct.

But really the inherant jumping at my throat asside of course sp2 has flaws, everything has flaws. Exploits are made as fast (if not faster) than fixes HOWEVER your evidence was linking to SP1 which is clearly outdated.

As for mass scanning...do you have any....any idea of the implications of that? Have you ever tried mass scanning an IP range and seen the impact on your resources time and network utilization? Possible yes but HIGHLY unlikely. The amount of people in every ip range changes about as often as a goldfish forgets it's own name so that would mean a server bank of machines constantly scanning and scanning and scanning and then another server bank just trying to exploit code on the scanned machines.

Sure you could mention that the infected machines would be used as my theoretical 'server' but how did those machines get infected in the first place? Did Joe Hacker REALLY load up the good 'ole Superscan and guess random ranges until an Ip that JUST SO happened to have the right OS version popped up on his list? Or did the person run IE on a naughty website?

The possibility of browsing causing spyware is infinately higher. Good anti-virus, good anti-spyware, a good browser and enough sense not to click everything is all you truly need.
 
Last edited:
Its a lot easier than you think.

Scanning the 196.xxx.xxx.xxx ranges will be mostly SA if not all SA. 165.xxx.xxx.xxx is also used by the ADSL guys. So you have a group of guys scanning those IPs. Each exploited machine they find continues the scanning as well...and so it spreads. Eventually they could have a whole botnet running which could execute virtually any command they want.

Locally it might drain resources, but overseas the connections can easily handle mass scanning. Most of the hack / exploit code would be coming from overseas in any case. Either way... its guarenteed that someone or something will be attempting to connect to you within minutes of being online.
 
The Actual Problem

Hi Guys,

Sorry to do this, but I'd like to bring this back to where it all started. I can't seem to use uTorrent or any BitTorrent client on the Sentech MyWireless network as it is compling about the return port.

I have tried the above suggestions, i.e.: HTTP-Tunneling and using BitComet but it still does not work. I TEMPORARILY turned off my firewall (Sygate Pro) to see if that was the cause, have reloaded and used a fresh machine and still I cannot seem to get it to work.

If someone can offer me some help here, it would greatly appreciated.

Thank you
DWD
 
FWIW when I was with sucktech a torrent would be very slow, max I got was about 12 KB/s on a 256k package and average about 5 KB/s
 
Well you're lucky. I'm 128 and I am luckk if I can get 2kb/s. However, at this point I am getting 0kb/s and consdering that my contract ends at the end of this month, I would like to rape their service as much as possible. I've not once come close to exceeding their 10GB cap so now's a good time as any...
 
For interest sake, do you get the same error when you use a different port? eg. 65535

I havent had any problems with the above port
 
Yes! I have tried a number of ports and it still does not work. I have tried almost everything that I can think of....
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X