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How important is port forwarding, actually?
(lemmy.one)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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One important aspect is that two peers without port forwarding will never be able to connect to each other. This is important for torrents with low amount of peers. Unless a connectable peer comes in to essentially relay data by grabbing the content from the other person and then seeding to you, you won't be able to download. For popular torrents with plenty of connectable peers to go around this is less of an problem, it will only cause some performance issues.
This isn't quite true, if three peers support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Transport_Protocol, a third peer that has a port forward can act as a STUN server for the two peers without and let them connect directly to each other.
I don't know how well it works in practice, but Transmission supports it so I'll rely on it while this whole PF business settles down.