Port forwarding for running a Bitcoin client

[Guest]

I need to set up port forwarding in order to run a Bitcoin client (Bitcoin Core). The default port for Bitcoin is 8333, so I tried using that number for the local port and a random number for the remote port. Unfortunately in this case I get only 8 connections (a symptom that the port is closed). If I use a random number for both the local and the remote port I get an higher number of connections (a symptom that the port is open), but after several hours the total uploaded data is not significantly higher than the downloaded data (a symptom that I'm not really contributing to the Bitcoin network). What can I do? Also I'm using Gufw as my firewall of choice. In this case which port should I allow? The local or the remote one? Thank you.

[zhang888 1066]

Hi,

It's not mandatory to run your Bitcoin core client on the default port (8333).

Any port will be fine, as long as you forwarded it correctly to your end machine behind NAT (Air > your firewall > your machine).

 

Later you can check if your node is reachable, by entering your Air exit IP and the forwarded port, right here:

 

https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/

 

 

P.S.

The downloaded/uploaded data varies depending on the load on the global Bitcoin network and the availability of nodes. Considering that all the ports are forwarded correctly,

you shouldn't get "lower" connection priority just because of a non-standard port.

[Guest]

From the website you told me (https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/) I can see my Bitcoin client in both cases (local port = remote port and local port != remote port). But I have to specify the remote port in the latter case.

 

Let me quote this paragraph from https://airvpn.org/ports/:

 

If you forward a port for a p2p torrent client, do NOT remap it to a different local port and make sure that the torrent client port matches the remotely forwarded port number, otherwise your client will communicate to trackers (if you use them) the wrong port: torrent clients will communicate to trackers the port number you have configured in them. As a result, you will get no incoming packets from the swarm and the torrent client network status token will remain yellow.

 

As far as I can understand this means that the local port should match the remote port when using a torrent client. Is this rule valid with Bitcoin clients, too? In my experience it is, because if local port != remote port I am limited to 8 connections, as I said before. What's your opinion?