local and remote connections

[scarecrow_76]

first off, hope i posted this in the right spot. next, evry since i have installed bitcomet 70 i have never had remote peers. i have everything set up correctly. even downloaded kerio firewall and disabled windows firewall. kept messing with my settings to get better speedsand such. now, 8 months later i am downloading a torrent and notice that kerio firewall isn't running. check my peers section and all of a sudden i have remote connections! (but i also have no firewall going) so i start kerio firewall and my remotes disappear!. so i turn of kerio and turn on windows firewall and my remotes come back. any ideas or should i just uninstall kerio and be done with it?

[bitdave]

I use kerio free and have never had any problems getting remotes.

Maybe you dont have Kerio set up right

In the Network security tab under applications

make sure that bitcomet has all permits

Under Intrusions I recommend disabling HIPS and I also have application behavior blocking disabled

If you cant figure it out then by all means use windows firewall. It is great for stopping inbound intrusions but you will lose outbound blocking of things phoning home.

[Dark_Shroud]

I'm so glade MS fixed that for the Vista firewall.

[kluelos]

A remote connection is someone else in the swarm attempting to initiate contact with your client, using the listen port you specified.

That's very different from most internet connectivity you do, where YOU initiate the connection (to, say, a web server) and it replies to you. Because the incoming traffic is a reply to something you sent, your firewall does not block it.

But that remote connection is not a reply. It's a new initiation. All firewalls block these, because that's what they're for. So you have to create an exception, a firewall rule, that says "allow traffic on the listen port (whatever you set it as) through. This rule isn't associated with a program. It doesn't say "allow that traffic through to BitComet" or "Allow it through to Firefox". It just says "allow it through". Your WinSock implementation, not your firewall, decides where the traffic goes once it's through.

So you configure your firewall(s) differently and separately from the part where you allow programs to access the internet. All that is for outbound traffic, but this is inbound traffic.

If you didn't create an exception rule for your listen port, then Kerio was blocking unsolicited traffic on that port, as is its task. When you disabled all firewalls (very, very bad idea!) all of your ports were open including that one, so traffic could get through. (So could the traffic that probably infected your system on other ports while your firewalls were off.)