The problem: My download is fine but seeding is very slow and intermittent even for popular torrents. I think this could be improved using IPv6 via 6to4. 6in4 or 6rd, all of which are supported by my router, to discover more peers.
My ISP allowed me to forward the port so I am discoverable via IPv4, but doesn’t support IPv6 and I understand the aforementioned technologies as a way to connect to a tunnel broker, which would forward my packets to the IPv6 internet.
However, they are another entity that can monitor my internet activity. Are there any, preferrably free, 6in4/6to4/6rd tunnel providers that are known to be torrent-friendly? Are there any firewall rules I should set up for my security, like only allowing IPv6 traffic to the qBittorrent port? My ISP doesn’t care about torrenting so I haven’t been using any kind of VPN. Should I?
Oddly enough, I have no problems seeding on a specifically Central European torrent tracker, which usually maxes out my measly 2 Mb/s DSL upload, but the dozens of peers at international trackers, some of which must be in Europe, barely leech data from me. Am I presumed to be slow because of a slow ping from the presumably American server, or is my disqualification from IPv6 so impactful? I find it strange as I can download from 20+ peers simultaneously and top out my 20 Mb/s plan.
I don’t think rerouting torrent traffic via tunnelbroker is a very good idea. The added overhead and latency only hurt your throughput and any torrent peer you have will be able to reach you through IPv4 anyway. I think I’d be best to disable IPv6 on your torrent client if you’re using tunnelbrokers to get access to IPv6.
No free tunnelbrokers I know are pirate friendly. You can set one up yourself by renting a seedbox and forwarding the seedbox’s IPv6 subnet to your home network if you have the technical know-how. At that point you should probably be using the seedbox to download in the first place, though.
Makes sense. I don’t think latency is a great issue when transferring large files, I would be more concerned about packet drop. (Unless latency is part of the reason the tracker thinks I’m too slow to bother requesting data from, which would explain why American-based trackers barely let me seed but local ones work great.) The overhead of TCP torrenting is about 3-4 % for me, and even if an IPv6 tunnel increases that to say 25 %, I will be able to use 80 % of my upload bandwidth for seeding, assuming IPv6 allows me to reach enough peers to request 1.6 Mb/s from me, which would be much higher than the current <1 %. My logic was that I could reach people that don’t have a publically reachable IPv4 port but an IPv6 one (because of IPv4 exhaustion of course), but now I understand that this is way less of an impact than I thought.