Connecting

All of a sudden, I seem to be having trouble connecting to people to download files. I\'m on a mac running 10.4 and using Azureus. For newer torrents--torrents with lots of seeders--I usually don\'t have many problems (although, that\'s not stable). For any torrent with only 2 or 3 seeders, it\'s very unlikely that I can connect to any of them. For example, the Great Hotels DVD I\'ve been downloading for a couple of days now, and it only seems to download at night (to another leacher), and won\'t connect during the day. I\'ve opened the ports in the firewall, and I can\'t forward the ports because I don\'t want to mess with the router in our house and disrupt the whole family. I can\'t seem to find a port that works the best. Is there something else I can do to boost my chances. I\'ve tried to seed as much as I can that I\'ve already downloaded, thinking my ratio was too low. Any help would be appreciated!

You absolutely have to forward the port you are using to the cable/dsl modem. Azureus defaults to using port 6881. If you open port 6881 on your router and forward it to 192.168.100.1 (most people\'s cable modem address- I don\'t know what the address for a dsl modem is).

If you don\'t forward the port, your connections will always be hit and miss and unstable. It is worth the time and effort to forward the port, and it shouldn\'t disrupt your family to forward the port. It won\'t affect regular web-surfing.

Hmmm, ok. I need a static ip address to do that, right? For some reason the option to add a port is grayed out for our airport, meaning I can\'t click it. Is that because my ip isn\'t static?

No, I don\'t have a static ip. The ip that I listed is the standard ip for cable modems. Just go into the router config and forward port 6881 to 192.168.100.1. If you are connected to the \'net a different way, you\'ll have to ask someone else. Sorry!!

Ok, well we have DSL going into our Apple Airport Extreme. However, I don\'t have the option in the airport (router) config to forward ports. I\'ve found guides online, but what they tell me to do, I can\'t because it\'s \"grayed out.\" Hmmm. . . I guess I can just deal with hit and miss.