Bittorrent kills my router

Been trying to download ubuntu from the link provided by VM-ware so;

Got Bittorrent running, ramps up to reasonably high speed then slowly tails off to nothing at which point my router dies, in fact kills the wifi dead (iPhone dropped connection aswell). Power cycled router tried again same result!

Have googled this and tried lowering the max up/down limits, no use.

There is mention that this may be related to number of concurrent connections
bit torrent is attempting to use, is there a way of capping this? as it doesn't seem to be an option in preferences??? or is there a better torrent app to use?

Just curious, which router do you have? Brand and model? Some routers I have both owned and helped others with had issues with downloading long torrent downloads and having to be reset all the time.

Is a DG834PN (Netgear rangemax) running firmware V1.03.39 which is the current level. I use WPA - PSK for security.

I have no other issues with it IMac, iPhone, Dell PC (kids), PS3 all work no problem just have this issue when using my MacBook with BitTorrent over WIFI - come to think of it I haven't tried Bittorrent on the iMac which is LAN connected, will do that later.

You do have port forwarding turned on, right?

Er nope ?? not sure how that would kill wifi but go on.....

so assuming that it's not just the wifi ssid that disappears etc then port forwarding will prevent concurrent connections? - I seem to be uploading as well as downloading?? what port to forward to where in router?

maxdog said:

so assuming that it's not just the wifi ssid that disappears etc then port forwarding will prevent concurrent connections? - I seem to be uploading as well as downloading?? what port to forward to where in router?

Click to expand...

Port forwarding is a prerequisite for Bittorrent. Basically, you need to tell your router that all BT traffic should be sent to a particular computer behind the firewall. If BT is working (and you're uploading as well as downloading), then chances are your router is forwarding all traffic. That could certainly cause it to act weird.

OK so yep had a look and desktop acts differently to laptop both weird.

So wrote some port rules and cross fingers been downloading for 5 mins now at around 60Kbps so we'll see how it goes.

However can anybody explain;

BT works on PC with no port forwarding

Now I have port forwarding on I appear to be downloading not uploading?

BT instructions say should work Natted without port forwarding?(pf only serves to speed things up!)


Or is just my router being er..........netgear

How secure to leave these ports open or should close them when not in use?