Trouble with Torrents

Since torrent downloading generally involves pirated and illegal software, you will not find much help here at a site sponsored by a major hardware/software producer - Apple.

Of course there are. Care to disclose what you are downloading?

Personally, I mostly use torrents to download Linux distributions.

Making assumptions about somebody who wants to get a BitTorrent client working isn't any less ridiculous than making assumptions about somebody who wants an FTP client, or even a web browser, for that matter. They're all just transports, but BitTorrent is especially good at sharing the load on large file transfers.

As for troubleshooting suggestions, BitTorrent works by using a bunch of incoming connections, so the first place to look is at the routing and firewalling setup. On a typical home network, using DHCP'd 'private' IP addresses, it's simplest if the router and Torrent client both use uPnP (Universal Plug and Play), which allows the BitTorrent client to create the necessary port mappings (in the router/firewall/NAT gateway) automatically.

Torrent transfers are at the very best painfully slow. Legitimate items like LInux Distros can be downloaded directly from their respective sites. There's no need to use torrents. I've downloaded no less then six Linux distros and never needed to resort to torrents. The same can be said for most any legitimate software. They can be downloaded much faster elsewhere and at no extra cost. Hate to say it but torrents are mainly used for illegitimate transfers.

Regardless of what torrent transfers are mainly used for, they are a good thing for efficient, wide distribution of large files, and as for the 'painfully slow' bit, that hasn't been my experience. I'm sure that any provider of huge content to a huge audience would LOVE to use BitTorrent technology rather than pay CDN's (content delivery networks) to handle the bandwidth requirements.

The painful thing about downloading torrents is you have to open your machine up to the network to be able to download torrents at anything other than glacial speeds.

If you're uncomfortable about letting other machines connect to yours to distribute seeds, it doesn't work out very well for you.

While there is a large amount of torrent-related piracy out there, many legitimate sources have torrents available for software updates, as well as for the distribution of free software packages such as linux and gnu-licensed projects.

Bittorrent is a great technology and has many legitimate uses. What bittorrent client are you using? Have you setup port forwarding on your router correctly?

At school you wont be able to use bittorrent applications as you wont be able to setup your schools network only the schools network admin can do that. Most schools prohibit the use of p2p applications so your out of luck there.

At home you can configure your router.

also, what if i'm using a landline?

A land line can only do 56k modem connections so you could download a linux distro but it would take about year to download.

You also state in your last post

whether i'm using them for illegal downloads or not,

I can't help you anymore as you are now suggesting that you are trying to get illegal content and I cannot condone this and I really think that this thread should be removed now.

I thought from your initial postings we were chatting about legit downloads. I use torrent sites frequently and many have legal downloads.

Vuze the client formerly known as Azureus has much legal media and a media browser built into it.

I use a uPnP daemon in my OpenWRT router to dynamically set up the necessary forwarding, and I'm fine with seeding files for others. I usually download a torrent, then leave Azureus running for a few days to do my part. Then I close Azureus and forget about torrents again for a while.

Torrent software while it may be used legally, frequently involves more risk than other downloading software for bringing viruses, and malware into a network because it opens up machines on the network to act as servers for someone else. Unless a user is aware they may be doing this, the network administrators have every logical reason to limit their access. I would discuss with your network administrator to discover if they are doing this, and to ask them for alternative means of obtaining your legal software. FTP and software download sites such as Macupdate and Versiontracker are quite popular for Mac software.