UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,
I'm behind a university firewall where nearly all ports are blocked. Therefore I've set up a ssh tunnel to my comp at home so that I can bypass the uni firewall and use bittorrent. I used mainly these 3 guides to setup the tunnel: http://freebsdcluster.org/~lasse/sshazureustunnel/ , Whalesalad Tunneling BitTorrent over SSH and FOSSwire A Very Easy SSH Proxy/Tunnel . I'm running Windows on both machines and I used Cygwin to install OpenSSH server at home.

I DID manage to connect to my cpu at home and also am able to download! (Priorly, I couldn't dl at all). I forwarded port TCP 7654 via SSH to my laptop using this command line in the client terminal: ssh -R 7654:localhost:7654 -A -D 1080 root@serveripathome. I dont use Putty because it randomly crashes on my laptop for some strange reason.

On the ssh server at home I virtually enabled everything including TCPKeepAlive, AllowTcpForwarding, AllowAgentForwarding and GatewayPorts. I also configured Azureus(that's what I use for downloading) to use a proxy.

However, when I test port 7654 in the bittorrent client I get NAT reachability OK and a green dot in the bottom, but at the same time there are, in fact, no incoming connections at all ever! My download speed is also really pathetic like 5-10kB/s while my upload speed is always at its max....
In the Cygwin terminal window I keep getting these messages every 2 sec: channel 3: open failed: connect failed: connection timed out, channel 4: open failed connect failed: connection refused.... etc

Any help plz?

Well I'm no expert on the topic, but knowing the nazi-esque approach most uni's take to internet access, it's possible(?) that they are throttling ssh download rate probably to circumvent exactly what you're trying to do. No-one cares about upload speed anymore (so far as internet costing is concerned) so they probably wouldn't bother throttling that.

I've also been behind uni proxies which kill your ability to simultaneously download file sections (like what ReGet does for you), so I would think something similar is occurring with the channel 3/channel 4 etc. errors. Um, if all else fails have a look at the eMule homepage, and search for their document on 'High ID vs. Low ID'. In your context, I would class it a Low ID as you have all the associated shortcomings!

Sorry I can't help more, but that's what I think is going on.