The problem: My download is fine but seeding is very slow and intermittent even for popular torrents. I think this could be improved using IPv6 via 6to4. 6in4 or 6rd, all of which are supported by my router, to discover more peers.
My ISP allowed me to forward the port so I am discoverable via IPv4, but doesn’t support IPv6 and I understand the aforementioned technologies as a way to connect to a tunnel broker, which would forward my packets to the IPv6 internet.
However, they are another entity that can monitor my internet activity. Are there any, preferrably free, 6in4/6to4/6rd tunnel providers that are known to be torrent-friendly? Are there any firewall rules I should set up for my security, like only allowing IPv6 traffic to the qBittorrent port? My ISP doesn’t care about torrenting so I haven’t been using any kind of VPN. Should I?
Oddly enough, I have no problems seeding on a specifically Central European torrent tracker, which usually maxes out my measly 2 Mb/s DSL upload, but the dozens of peers at international trackers, some of which must be in Europe, barely leech data from me. Am I presumed to be slow because of a slow ping from the presumably American server, or is my disqualification from IPv6 so impactful? I find it strange as I can download from 20+ peers simultaneously and top out my 20 Mb/s plan.
I tried a public tunnel broker and it immediately makes everything super slow. All the connections that grabbed the IPv6 connectivity went from my theoretical 300MBit/s to like 10-20 MBit/s.
Please don’t say “MBit”, it makes my eyes hurt.
My internet plan tops out at 2 Mb/s upload so that wouldn’t nearly fill such a public tunnel broker’s bandwidth, and I would be glad for even half that, but right now I seed 500 GB of reasonably popular movie packs and the long-term average upload is a few kilobits per second, not worth spinning up the 10W HDD motor for. Yes, I expect some overhead with tunneling but not three orders of magnitude, and I need at least 100 kb/s to get a good ratio on those movie packs.
Fair enough. I need someone to provide me with a way on how to remember which one was capitalized and which one small.
Byte is the 8x bigger one – longer word – capital B (but the word, unless shortened, is “byte”, not “Byte”),
bit is the 8x smaller one – shorter word – lowercase b.
There is a roughly 0.8% difference per order of magnitude between 1024-based binary prefixes (ki=kibi, Mi=mebi, Gi=gibi, often incorrectly written as k, M, G) and 1000-based metric prefixes (k=kilo, M=mega, G=giga) but these ballpark numbers are not affected.
Anyway, do you think it’s worth trying in terms of security against threats and law enforcement, or should I use a VPN on top?
It’s supposed to say “Mbit” or “Mb”. Capital B infers bytes. Incorrect capitalization is one of the most common mistakes when using the metric system. It may be popular but it becomes a problem when 1 B = 8 b, or when 1 MJ = 10⁹ mJ. By the way, common ad-hoc abbreviations like “kbps” as opposed to “kb/s” or “PSI” instead of “lbf/in²” also grind my gears, luckily most such mistakes only occur in imperial units.
Makes sense. I don’t think latency is a great issue when transferring large files, I would be more concerned about packet drop. (Unless latency is part of the reason the tracker thinks I’m too slow to bother requesting data from, which would explain why American-based trackers barely let me seed but local ones work great.) The overhead of TCP torrenting is about 3-4 % for me, and even if an IPv6 tunnel increases that to say 25 %, I will be able to use 80 % of my upload bandwidth for seeding, assuming IPv6 allows me to reach enough peers to request 1.6 Mb/s from me, which would be much higher than the current <1 %. My logic was that I could reach people that don’t have a publically reachable IPv4 port but an IPv6 one (because of IPv4 exhaustion of course), but now I understand that this is way less of an impact than I thought.
