Question about some Bittorrent settings

[76548918 0]

I'm relatively new to VPNs and I'm having a hard time finding out what I should do about a few general settings in my torrent client. I use Windows 7 and qBittorrent, and my settings so far are as follow:

• qBittorrent is only bound to the interface used by the VPN;
• UPnP/NAT-PMP in qBittorrent is disabled;
• qBittorrent's listening port is set to the port I opened in the AirVPN web client settings;
• at the router level, UPnP is disabled and no ports are forwarded;
• Network Lock (automatic mode) in the AirVPN client is enabled;
• a proxy is not being used -- all traffic is simply being routed through the VPN;
• and lastly, the AirVPN client has mostly default settings.

 

What I should do about the uTP, DHT, PEX, and Local Peer Discovery settings in qBittorrent? Currently I have them all disabled, but is it safe to enable them, or do I run the risk of having my actual IP exposed to ths swarm if I enable some of them?

[foxmulder 43]

Hi,

 

the settings do look reasonable at first glance. If Port Forwarding is really necessary is doubtful in my opinion. qBittorrent as well as any other modern torrent client can do "NAT punching", what enables them to initiate bidirectional connections without having any ports forwarded.

 

I keep port forwarding disabled as it can be a security risk, but with AIRs Network lock you should be safe nevertheless.

 

µTP is the micro transport protocol, i'm not sure what this does, so i can't help you with that. Maybe some other fellow can elaborate... ?!

 

Well, DHT (Distributed Hash Table) and PEX (Peer Exchange) should usually be enabled unless you use private trackers.

 

Enable DHT and PEX and delete all the trackers that come with you torrent. I completely go without trackers, as sometimes there can be malicious ones among them.

 

Local Peer Discovery is only to be enabled if you want to connect to peers on a local network. If you don't have a home network, keep it disabled.

 

Regarding the setting "Encryption mode": Just set it to "Prefer Encryption". As your connection is encrypted anyway through the VPN, there is no need to apply "Force Encryption".

 

When it comes to "Maximum connections" and that stuff, this read could shed some light on this matter:

 

http://infinite-source.de/az/az-calc.html

 

Regards and happy 2016

 

Fox

 

EDIT:Hmm, enabling µTP causes a heavy speed hit. Don't know why though. Better to leave it disabled then...