torrent question

[Dazed_75]

On 10/18/07, Dazed_75 <lthielster at gmail.com> wrote:
> I constantly see advice that for using a torrent I should set my
> router to port forward a number of ports to the using computer.
> Problem is that there may be more than one computer on the LAN using
> torrents now that they are so prevalent.  For example, I have an old
> and a new gaming machine with different games that use torrents for
> patch days.  I download a lot of Linux distros (normally on a Linux
> box) to try and torrents are great for that.  I don't typically
> download any music but if I did it would be on my media machine.
>
> So the question is how does one deal with that sine the router can
> only forward those ports to a single machine.  One thought might be to
> forward one or two of those ports to each using machine.  How do
> people deal with this issue?
>
I found http://youscrewedup.com/torrent_router_tutorial/ which seems
to answer the question in a couple of ways.

1) The name of the site is kinda wierd so I wonder if any of you can
verify the information seems legitiimate.

2)  According to the NAT section, it seems like it will work if you
"just" unblock ports 6881-6889 on the router.  I am wondering just how
unsafe that might be.  Input?

3) Further down in the article under "port forwarding, virtual server"
it seems to talk about another method but I am a bit unclear on it.
It seems to me that would somehow require the torrent clients on
additional machines would have to somehow tell torrent servers to use
a different port range than usual and I have not a clue how one would
do that.  Am I (once again) misreading something?

-- 
The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being
either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
  - George F. Will