Shareaza

Recently all the p2p clients that I utilize, Shareaza among them, stop working as in not able to connect. I believe that the ISP I use is somehow sending external connections points to a dead end rather than to me. Is there a way around this?

Do you pass the Shareaza Connection Test? (See the help menu within Shareaza.)

No. The connection test fails because the ports tested are to an IP address which is not mine.

How did you find this out? Could you show us the test log?

While Shareaza was running I utilized one of the websites where one can test the connection. The log indicated the following:

Data dump: v1.12 (+AA),to=5,ipf=no,ip=207.245.xxx.xx,proxy=,port=6346,lang=en,el=0,php=5.3.10-pl0-gentoo
host=jlh.no-ip.org,path=/connectiontest/index.php,t=2012-04-05T03:45:22Z

Start connection test for TCP...
Get socket.
Attempt to connect to 207.245.236.60 on port 6346.
socket_connect() failed, error 115: Operation now in progress.
(Ignore the previous error reason, it's a timeout instead.)
Close socket.
Done, return code: 'TIMEOUT'.

Start connection test for UDP...
Get socket.
Attempt to bind to INADDR_ANY on any port.
Send /JCT: 3x12 bytes: GND\002sq\001\001\020JCT
Read response:
No proper answer received.
Close socket.
Done, return code: 'NOTHING'.


The IP address is not the one that I have been assigned. The test was run several times from more than one site. Initially I thought that it may have been a problem with my firewall but allowing all traffic, as well as fully disabling it, had no positive results.

How much does the IP you see there differs from your own one? Does it at least start with the same numbers?

It's all the same with the exception of the last octet.

How did you verify your own IP? I assume you do use a website of some sort for this. Have you rechecked the result on other (similar) sites?

Because what you describe can have two causes: 1. The source where you got your own IP from was wrong (in this case the setup of your own router is also wrong) and 2. The IP Shareaza has from your computer is wrong (something I have never heard of before).

Meanwhile, could you tell me what happens if you query the connection test website while replacing the false IP in the query string with the correct one you got from some other source...?

I bet its firewall issue.

How did you verify your own IP? I assume you do use a website of some sort for this.

Using IPConfig/all. But this will only give my Private IP address. I then run tracert and see where the Private IP changes to a Public IP. But I have noticed that sites where one can check their IP such as http://www.myipaddress.com/show-my-ip-address, http://www.whatismyip.com, and http://www.lawrencegoetz.com/programs/ipinfo, provide one that is different and also the one that shows up when doing the Shareaza connection test. However, when I ping the latter IP Address I get no response. When I ping the IP address that I use from Tracert I do get a response.

Have you rechecked the result on other (similar) sites?

Yes.

Because what you describe can have two causes: 1. The source where you got your own IP from was wrong (in this case the setup of your own router is also wrong) and 2. The IP Shareaza has from your computer is wrong (something I have never heard of before).

I do not have a router. I am on a G3 network.

Meanwhile, could you tell me what happens if you query the connection test website while replacing the false IP in the query string with the correct one you got from some other source...?

I don't see where the option is of testing another IP address in the connection test. One seemingly can only change the Port number being tested.

http://jlh.no-ip.org/connectiontest/ind ... =en&test=1

http://test.atomo64.puffinhost.com

Further to the above I have tried testing which ports are open firstly using netstat -n and then going to http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports for confirmation. But the latter is indicating the ALL ports are closed.

If this is the case than that's why it won't work.

But it did work for a month. I started using Shareaza because both Emule and uTorrent were no longer connecting. Furthermore I also started using one of the DC++ clients which also connected, but it stopped working too.

I have tried changing ports with no positive results. Where is the setting to forward a port?
The inbound and oubound IP Adresses being used by Shareaza are the private rather than the public ones. Is there a way of changing this and would it make a difference?

One other thing I am thinking about is trying to use Shareaza through the Tor network but don't know how to make the necessary configurations for it to work.

Well, in this case your provider most certainly started filtering only recently. You can test here if there is protocol filtering in place in your network: http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php

If this is the case, calling your provider and telling them that you'd quit their services if they won't give you back the possibility to use all of the services provided on the internet might help.

Is the correct address static or does it change? If it doesn't change you can just type the correct address as "inbound address" or something similar in many P2P programs. More likely you should just change ISP, P2P filtering aside, meddling with TCP/IP packet addressing sounds like a bad case of incompetence to me. You might want to ask the ISP in case it is just some kind of accidental misconfiguration they will fix if notified.

Correct address would be the one returned by trace that allows you to bypass whatever filter has been set up. Basically I think they have just configured DHCP server in a way that it gives your router a public address that actually maps to some sort of a filtering box that then redirects packets it approves of to your actual network address. This is not the way it is supposed to be done so I think they might have used some sort of a short-cut to make it more reliable. Such as giving you a static address that can be statically mapped between the filtered and actual address or a dynamic address where the actual address is the filtered address with one bit masked out. (substract 128 or 64)

EDIT: This type of filtering apart from being stupid also has significant overhead, so they probably only trigger it for "heavy users" after their bandwidth use exceeds some value over some time.

I guess than they have some sort of Access Control List for which there is no way around it.

I think I may have found a solution to my problem and posting here so others having the same issue can benefit, or at least try it. I installed an application called Spotflux (http://spotflux.com/), which is freeware. One need not have to make any special configurations to make it work with Shareaza. It seems all Internet traffic with the exception of e-mail goes through Spotflux.