Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Windows Vista vs. GreedyTorrent

I got a call from a friend who just installed Windows Vista, complaining his torrent program wasn't connecting to any trackers and his downloads could not start. I went over to check what the problem was and saw that he installed utorrent 1.8 along with GreedyTorrent. GreedyTorrent is a program that modifies your upload statistics sent to the trackers so the sites that require a membership and keep track of what you are uploading can be deceived. I personally do not approve this method because if you are downloading a file illegaly from someone who shares, you should pay your debt by sharing it with someone else. Anyway, who am I to judge...



The Problem
All the trackers gave the error "Proxy connect error: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it." I was not really sure what was causing the connection error so I started to try anything I could think of. I closed GreedyTorrent first but it was of no use. Then while going through the preferences windows of utorrent, I noticed a weird setting. My friend had set some parameters for proxy connection even though he wasn't using one. Everything went back to normal when I cleared those fields but my friend insisted on using GreedTorrent and being a leecher. Then I read the short documentation of GreedyTorrent and checked for any mistakes he could have made. It all seemed normal but the documentation was old and written for Windows XP so I thought the problem might caused by Windows Vista. The settings he made in utorrent were as in this screenshot:






The MILD Solution
GreedyTorrent suggested the users to enter "localhost" in the Proxy field of their torrent client. After some search I found out that Vista users should use 127.0.0.1 in place of localhost. So after changing the field to the given ip, everything started working normally and no connecton error occured. If you are using GreedyTorrent with utorrent in Windows Vista, your Connection tab in utorrent preferences window should look like this (unless you have entered a nmber different than 3456 in GredyTorrent's client connection port):


Although I have given a solution for a leecher's problem, it does not mean I do support leeching. Please share what you downloaded from P2P. "Sharing is caring..." ;)