college network p2p woes, help a spaceshipster out!

[Jason]

so my girlfriend is going to school in west chester, and for the life of me, i can't get any p2p programs working for her. i've tried utorrent and azureus. i tried some limewire type program called frostwire. the only thing that seems to work is soulseek.

when i try to run a bittorrent client, i'm obviously having issues with port forwarding and i know i won't be able to get that working. college network admins lock that shit down. but here's the thing. i even have trouble just downloading a .torrent file. when i click a link on a torrent site to download the file and then start up a bt client, the file never downloads, it just starts up and then goes for a few seconds and stops, just hanging there. maybe the network admins have somehow blocked the download of certain file types? i'm confused.

i'm sure someone must know more about networking than me, especially someone awesome like conc. can anybody help me out? i'll live with getting a bt client to work in a sort of crippled fashion with slower speeds, as long as i can just get it working at all.

what do i do to get this show on the road?

p.s. forum admins, please don't close this. i know there are some lame rules regarding talking about this and that, but c'mon, sharing is caring.

[Fit of Rage]

Hi J,

My school's on campus net also had a block like this. We kinda-sorta got around it not by getting BT to work but by making our own P2P network called WASTE. People off campus would BT stuff like music, movies, software, and transfer it via external hard drive to some people on campus. Then anyone connected to WASTE can download it from anyone else on the on campus network.

Doesn't solve your situation, just telling you how we beat it. Maybe there's a similar thing at West Chester? I don't know how big her school is.

[Jeenyuss]

ftp?

[project dragon]

My university had that kind of lock when I lived in residence.
Some options were:

-Find out if your university has a hub on DC++. This means that you should be able to share and download stuff off your fellow students (only share with people on the same network).

-If you are trying to download music, you can try a program called ourtunes. It finds people on the itunes network (people who are sharing their music libraries on the network), and lets you download music off them (instead of just streaming which is what you can do off of itunes). Apparently this doesn't work with itunes 7 yet, but you may still want to give it a try.

-For some reason, when I go on campus with my laptop, things will download when I am on wireless. If your girlfriend has a laptop, maybe you could give this a try.

-Get someone not in the university campus to download the stuff, and send it over msn or upload it somewhere.

-Find direct downloads for what you are looking for.

[Jason]

http://txtor.dwerg.net

you paste a torrent file link location into this site and it somehow converts the target to a text file, which i can download without any trouble. then i'm able to open the torrent with utorrent and all is well, except for the slow speeds because i'm unable to do proper port forwarding. but with forced encryption i'm at least hitting 30-50kbps on most torrents, which is tolerable.

[Izor]

wait wait wait...the college doesnt have an option to let you get your own internet from like...comcast?

[Jason]

well, it's not me. it's my girlfriend. she's living in some dorms, and no, you cannot get your internet service from a third party provider. not in the dorms anyway. if you live in a campus apartment or house, then yeah, you can do your own thing.

the solution i posted above has been working fantastically thus far. she's managing some pretty crazy speeds even without having done any port forwarding.

[Kolar]

My school does the same with limiting or denying .torrent file downloads. I would suggest keeping the speed within reason so it stays under the radar. I was using Rapidshare to download a lot of video files and they eventually limited HTTP download speeds to something like 40kbps, was going at 500-700kbps.

[DoTheFandango]

glad you found, txtor -- it's the most important by far.
if you find any private sites with SSL (like what.cd) that is usually good
i just found out UConn had a 10GB limit -- I went over that in 5 days.
they throttled my bandwidth @ 15kb/s.
it's tough.

[Nycle]

There is no solution. If it's blocked, it's blocked for a reason. Only way to (re)gain access is to contact the network administrators and ask if they would be kind enough to lift whatever blocks they have in place. Doubtful they'd do that though.

I feel blessed to have uncensored full speed access to my uni's internet connection, don't see many schools or companies that do that.

Edit: Oh, I'll keep that forced encryption thing in mind in case I might ever need it :thumbsup:

[Izor]

the only thing port forwarding will do is block incoming connections over utorrent/azureus. You can still have outbound connections which means you can still get pretty fast speeds eventually

[Jason]

yeah, without port forwarding it just takes longer than usual for the download to get up to speed. connecting with peers is a little slow at first until things get rolling. i'm pulling 500k/s though on torrents with lots of seeds/peers.

[PUNK rock]

glad you found, txtor -- it's the most important by far.
if you find any private sites with SSL (like what.cd) that is usually good
i just found out UConn had a 10GB limit -- I went over that in 5 days.
they throttled my bandwidth @ 15kb/s.
it's tough.

I thought the same happened to me at OSU. I got around 70GB in a 2 week period. The only thing that ever happened was a warning letter about downloading an HBO show.