Ubuntu – Torrents blocked by ISP in Ubuntu but on Windows works fine

dual-bootnetworkingSecuritytransmissionwindows

I have a dual boot system: Ubuntu and Windows. When I use Transmission for torrents, it doesn't download anything and in the browser torrents sites are blocked, But if I do same thing on Windows in the same network it works perfectly fine.

Not sure weather it has to do something with security since to me it looks like the ISP is able to interpret the data on Ubuntu but not on windows.
So, how do I fix this problem? Basically I want to know the root cause of why its blocked on Ubuntu but not on windows.

Thanks

Best Answer

Setting up P2P systems like bittorrent is a PITA and problems seem to recur even after things start working (especially with port forwarding).

Anything is possible, but it is very unlikely that your ISP even looks at your OS in this situation.

The usual problem is port forwarding. Bittorrent uses a port for incoming requests from other peers. Usually, this port will be closed by default in both your router/gateway and in your firewall on your computer. Opening the port will radically improve upload and download speeds for most torrents.

But, it should still work (slower) with it closed. So, until it does, there's no point in trying to fix the ports.

Here's what I would try:

Download (from your web browser) a torrent for a recent Linux distro like Ubuntu 16.04. Torrents like this usually have a huge number of seeders available from the Peer Exchange, DHT, and from the trackers, so you can get plenty of peers without them being able to find you via your port (which may be closed).

Start Transmission and add just this torrent to it (just to keep things simple) and start the torrent.

In Transmission, select Edit->Settings->Privacy and make sure the boxes for Use PEX and Use DHT are both checked (selected). These are the other 2 ways your client can find peers which may not be known by the tracker.

Once you have done this, this particular torrent should download/upload quickly. If it doesn't, then something really strange is going on.

Usually, the next place to start looking for issues would be in your gateway/router, but since it is letting bittorrent traffic through in Windows, there's probably nothing wrong there or at your ISP.

When you're done testing, you can delete the torrent from within Transmission to get your disk space back, but keep the original torrent file for use in future testing.

Once it works this much, we can get back to things like port forwarding to improve performance - especially on torrents with very few seeders from the trackers.

You can start with the guide they provide.

For future questions/posts like this, you should include information on your setup such as your OS/version, application (transmission) version, ... Each system is setup a bit differently than everyone else's and some problems have known solutions which have been fixed by newer versions of things.

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