ANSWERED qBittorrent connection icon green, even though port not forwarded?

[grapetouchcode 1]

When I run the qBittorrent client with active torrents, my connection status icon goes green, even if I haven't forwarded the proper incoming connection port through the VPN. If I set a listening port in qBittorrent, then I connect to AirVPN, and I haven't forwarded the listening port through AirVPN, then how can outside clients still connect to me? The fact that my client is connectable even though I haven't forwarded the proper port makes me worried that I'm somehow sending/receiving traffic outside the VPN.

 

Here's the process I went through to check this, which was reproducible with other port numbers:

 

Initially, I setup port forwarding and qBittorrent as explained in this post. On the AirVPN site client area, I added port 36720 in Client Area > Forwarded Ports (both TCP & UDP, same local port). Then I went into qBittorrent Options > Connection and set the "Listening Port" to 36720 as well. I ran qBittorrent, and the connection status icon went green, as expected. I confirmed that I could receive outside connections on port 36720 by using the "TCP Test" check in the AirVPN forwarded ports section. I also went to CanYouSeeMe.org and verified that I was connectable on port 36720.

 

Then, without changing anything else, I changed the listening port in qBittorrent to a random port, 45418. I restarted qBittorrent, and much to my surprise, after a few moments, the connection status icon went green again! It seems to take longer to switch from yellow to green when I use an unforwarded port, but it always goes to green eventually. According to CanYouSeeMe.org, I was not connectable on port 45418, yet qBittorrent reported that it was receiving connections.

 

I went over all the settings in qBittorrent I could think of that might cause it to make connections outside the VPN:

• UPnP/NAT-PMP was disabled
• DHT, PeX, and local peer discovery were disabled.
• In Options > Advanced, I set the network interface to my VPN interface, which I confirmed with ipconfig.

Am I missing something? I tried connecting to a different AirVPN server with the same results. As I said, this has me paranoid that I'm "leaking" traffic outside the VPN connection. I'm using qBittorrent version 3.3.12. Am I misunderstanding what the green connection status icon means? For the record, this is the icon I'm talking about:

 

 

Apologies for the long post, but I wanted to be thorough. If anyone could shed some light on this mystery, I would appreciate it. Thanks in advance!

[go558a83nk 352]

Is utp enabled?

[grapetouchcode 1]

 

Is utp enabled?

Are you referring to the option under Options > Speed > Rate Limits Settings? If so, yes. Here are my settings on that tab:

 

[go558a83nk 352]

I think utp will give you the green light. Disable it and restart the app and see.   I get better performance with it off anyway.

[grapetouchcode 1]

Wow, you're right, once uTP is disabled, the connection icon stays yellow when the client is set to listen on unforwarded ports. I tested several times with different torrents, trackers, and ports, and as long as I kept uTP off, the connection status never went green. Once I turned uTP on the status icon would eventually go green, usually within a few seconds.

 

I don't know much about uTP or what it does. A quick search tells me it's kind of a QoS protocol for torrents. So what would that have to do with allowing connections through an unforwarded port (if that's even what it's doing)?

 

In any case, thank you for the help!