As you can read in my few previous posts I have just installed a new Ubuntu 10.10 on a Toshiba Satellite L40 notebook.
Most of the things which are necessery for a fully working Linux desktop are already installed and the machine works fine, however I just noticed there is an issue with the default torrent gnome client and transmission unable to download files from torrent trackers.
Few minutes of playing with the transmission’s settings has revealed what was causing my torrent download problems.
It seems on Ubuntu 10.10 (probably on other Ubuntus and Debians) by default the transmission bittorrent client is trying to use for torrent download connections an incoming port 53636 number.
As the computer is behind a firewall and does not have a real IP address seeders cannot properly connect to the notebook port 53636 and hence the transmission bittorrent client could not initialize any torrent downloads.
Fixing up the issue is rather easy to fix it I had to change the settings in transmission from the menus:
Edit -> Settings -> Network
You need to select the options:
- Pick a random port on startup
- Use UPnP or NAT-PMP to redirect connections
Next I had to restart transmission and my torrent downloads started 😉