Is port forwarding really necessary?

Submitted by zonachi on Thu, 02/18/2016 - 04:19
Forums: 
Soulseek General Discussion

Hello everybody, I write from Italy.

I've been using Soulseek and his Linux side (Nicotine+) since 2002 or so...now I find incredible that such an oldschool service is still alive and I thank the programmers and the community for that!
Anyway I have a big problem with port forwarding. I'm using a shared router and I don't have access to it. And this is since 7 years...so I cannot port forward! And this means that I cannot share my music, because nobody can access my files.

I don't think I am the only one with this trouble, so I ask: is port forwarding really necessary? Is there a way to get rid of it and let me and many other users access the complete Soulseek network, adding files and sharing as all the others?

And the last question is: port forwarding can be one of the reason why Soulseek is slowly loosing users? Now people are facing with services like Spotify and Youtube, the whole web has turned to a hyperfast machinery where the users must get content in no time.
Soulseek has the good old flavour of how internet was in the '90s, but the troubles that a user can experience while setting it up (as port forwarding) can keep new users going away from it.
Or am I wrong?

Thank you!

Submitted by sammy123 on Wed, 02/24/2016 - 06:22.

Hi Zonachi
short: yes it is necessary. It's necessary for all Services you want to publish (http, ftp, SQL, svn, .....) as a normal router drops every packet he didn't asked for.
There are other ways to do it, using a server stationed mechanism which is by default critical as the server is doing the work AND exchanging the files.
As Peer-2-Peer says: it's a people network and not a server/client like you proclaim. torrent/ed2k/.... needs to work such P2P clients to offer services/files.
IPv6 will become a major challenge, as IPv4 programs like SLSK is up to now not possible to forward ports (which is handled much different in IPv6 as it is in IP4v networks).
SLSK seems to me pretty much alive....
Cheers

Submitted by marco6 on Sat, 02/27/2016 - 08:41.

Regarding port forwarding;

Do i need to have BOTH the listening port and obfuscated port opened in order to share my files? I am able to open ports, but i *cannot* open them in a sequential manner, e.g. 3000 and 3001. The ports i am assigned are random, and SoulSeek doesn't allow me to set them up that way since the client adds +1 to the listening port as the obfuscated port instead of allowing me to set it up manually.

Currently my listening port is open, and it appears nobody can get to my shares. I tried setting up the port as one number less, so SoulSeek uses the open port as the obfuscated one, but it didn't make any difference.

Ideas?

Submitted by sammy123 on Sun, 02/28/2016 - 23:12.

Hi Marco
afaik the used ports are fixed by the lower one. In nicotine+ it could be changed by some starting parameter, else obfocusation could be disabled as well. But I have seen SLSKqt behind a completely closed firewall as well working, BUT no search (all answers will be dropped, but those you sent to the search-distributing-server is working only, but chatrooms and search via persons of this chatrooms work (Browse files). But that's very limited capacity of SLSK. In most routers U can enable so called port ranges forwarded, which is another way to solve it.
Cheers