I recently learned that the trick to speeding up bit torrent downloads is to open up a range of ports that are blocked by a router. It's so simple right? If you're behind a router and you're getting really slow download speeds (less than 10kbps) just open up ports 6881 to 6889, that are blocked by the router and you can get speeds up to 200kbps+ (if you have broadband). Well, I seem to have a special talent for discovering problems in doing the simplest of tasks. For one thing, I don't have a linksys router, I have an Airport (Snow). How do you open up a range of ports using an Airport base station? Nobody seems to know how to do it, so I improvised.
For Public and Private Port fields I entered the same number (6881, 6882, etc). For the Private Address field I just entered my computer's ip address. I did this for every single port number I wanted to open. I don't know if this was the right thing to do, but surfing the net seems to be faster. I didn't notice any changes with bit torrent downloads right away, so I connected directly to my cable modem. Still no change in download speed. I connected back up to internet via Airport and have waited a little while and noticed that my download speed went up to 30kbps. That's the highest it's ever gone for me, but it went back down to 10kbps. I still haven't figured out how to open a range of ports with the Airport, but maybe someone else with publish the solution.
Update
I did followed all the steps up above, but I didn't realize one thing; the Airport changed my computer's ip address after I updated it. I looked at this forum and found some more directions, leading to a description of how to prevent the Airport from changing the computer's ip address, I think ;-). I don't expect anybody who doesn't have this set up to understand what I'm talking about, but I wanted to compile the information for those who do.
