uTorrent and PuTTY -> How to turn the connection into an active one?

Question

There is an active, and passive mode when we talk about torrent. Passive, is when you can't connect to the peers actively. Active is when your ports are forwarder, and others can connect to you.

What I did so far, is installed a Debian on my server. Then I added GatewayPorts yes into my sshd_config file. After that, in PuTTY, I set up the following configuration:
- Remote ports do the same
- Local ports accept connections from other hosts
Then I added a new forward like:
4D8080 (IPv4, Dynamic, at my PC's port 8080).

After this, I set my uTorrent to use SOCKS5 proxy for every possible connection, at localhost, port 8080. But, my client will show the red sign at the bottom-right part.

Is there a solution to this? (Something is surely not right, I get 0 DHT nodes too.)

Answer 1

you need to do it the other way around ... You need to have remote ports accepting connections from other hosts. And a firewall rule on your server allowing incoming traffic to the listening port set in utorrent preferences. (although i'm not sure if this gets propagated through socks - you need to try it out and check netstat)

Answer 2

The dynamic SOCKS proxy mode (the "D" option) cannot handle incoming connections for you because there's no such provision in the protocol. A proxy protocol is only supposed to handle your outgoing connections after all.

You need to add a remote redirection (the "R" option), so your SSH server listens on a port and redirects the packets to you. See the following man page extract:

 -R [bind_address:]port:host:hostport
     Specifies that the given port on the remote (server) host is to
     be forwarded to the given host and port on the local side.  This
     works by allocating a socket to listen to port on the remote
     side, and whenever a connection is made to this port, the connec-
     tion is forwarded over the secure channel, and a connection is
     made to host port hostport from the local machine.

     Port forwardings can also be specified in the configuration file.
     Privileged ports can be forwarded only when logging in as root on
     the remote machine.  IPv6 addresses can be specified by enclosing
     the address in square braces or using an alternative syntax:
     [bind_address/]host/port/hostport.

     By default, the listening socket on the server will be bound to
     the loopback interface only.  This may be overriden by specifying
     a bind_address.  An empty bind_address, or the address '*', indi-
     cates that the remote socket should listen on all interfaces.
     Specifying a remote bind_address will only succeed if the
     server's GatewayPorts option is enabled (see sshd_config(5)).

Note however this port forwarding feature can change origin IP of the remote peer which can mess up the bittorrent protocol. If this is the case, you need to use VPN instead of SSH.