I've been running a seedbox for some time now but have never made a new torrent before. I've got a file I want to make publicly available but for some reason can't seed it normally.

On the seedbox, Transmission is bound to an open port, and I added the best 20 trackers from this repo to the torrent. I also have a client I'm trying to test uploading to, but it can't seem to connect to the seedbox unless I also open the port on the leech client. Once I do it works normally, but I was under the impression only the seeder needed to be on an open port in order for clients to connect. Am I wrong and it's expected that both seeder and leecher have open ports? Would really appreciate some help!

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[–] BremboTheFourth@piefed.ca 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I’m not familiar with ProtonVPN configuration so can’t guide you much there, presumably if the port forwarding option only allows for one setting then maybe it’s doing both TCP/UDP? I dunno..

Maybe that's a good place for me to do some digging, but this is an issue specific to the new torrent I made. Things I download first seed just fine, and at much higher rates when I have the port open, so I think that's working normally regardless of any TCP/UDP stuff under the hood.

can the test torrent client see that there is a seed on the torrent?

I think I misread this. No, neither client sees any peers, but when viewing the trackers within the client, the trackers are reporting peers. I'll keep what I originally typed in the spoiler below.

Tap for spoiler

Yes. Incidentally, when I opened the port on the leech client, a few other leechers joined the swarm as well, but I was only ever able to upload anything to my own test client. Even once the upload finished, neither client uploaded anything to those other leechers either. A few hours later, the count (looking from both seed and leech client) went back down to 1 seeder and 1 leecher.

Um. Just out of curiosity, I checked the peer list again, and while I'm still the only leecher, some of the trackers are now showing multiple seeders? I definitely only ever uploaded anything to myself, how is that possible?