So it’s 1 am and I’m stuck trying to solve this issue. I’m finally throwing in the towel and asking for help.
I have a server on my local network with a bittorrent client on it. I’ve configured it to run through a VPN I have set up on a linode VPS. That’s all working fine, but I can’t seem to open the peer listening port for the torrent client. I’ve got the listening port open in the iptables config of the VPS, but when I run netstat, I find that there isn’t anything listening on that port. What am I missing here? How can I get that port open?
I’m not 100% certain than all aspects of the BitTorrent protocol are free from peers (mis-)identifying their own IP address.
You could substitute the BitTorrent server, with a simple http server listening on the same port that you’ve forwarded
$ python -m http.server 34567
Will listen on 34567 , and you should be able to access it from your phone browser easily locally or maybe just run curl or wget from a different computer.
If that works, you can try it through the VPN (e.g. flip your phone off of wifi). If that works, it’s likely the BitTorrent client setup that’s missing something.
If it doesn’t work, you can debug much simpler tcp until it works with tcpdump and iptables counters and logs until it works.