Requiring help with firewall, interent speed and bittorrent. I'm lost!

**Tom--d** · June 15th, 2008

I've been using ubuntu for a while now and I love it.
The only thing I've never got to grip was a firewall.

I have ufw enabled and port 80 and 22 are on 'allow' I know port 80 is for Internet and 22 for ssh. But really. I still dont know what allow means.

Also, I think my internet is slow at responding. Not at downloading, once its downloading a file, the speeds are high. but Just general surfing the internet is slow.

Many every link I click has a delay. Gnome-look.org is slow for me. Ubuntuforums can be slow.
How can I speed things up?

Another thing, bittorent. Im using Transmission. It says that the port its using is closed. What does that mean? But then, i can still downlaod through transmission. Im lost :S
The most important thing is, how do I speed up torrents?

And if ufw, if I deny port 80, I STILL can surf the web. Again, im lost.

but on shields up, they say that ALL my ports are stealth. And again, Im lost.

O yes, Firestarter doesnt work on my computer. it loads up on start up but with errors saying wlan0 is not there. then firewall turns off. then my ndiswrapper is loaded and then wlan0 is there. but firestarter doesnt see that anymore.

on the other hand, ufw enables the firewall at start up

Another thing, do I even need a firewall?

**Tom--d** · June 15th, 2008

Please, anyone?

**hyper_ch** · June 15th, 2008

(1) are you sure you need a firewall? Normally you don't any or rather you should configure the firewall on your router.

(2) if you only allow port 80 and port 22 then you can't use torrent as they use other ports and those are blocked - as you say...

**Tom--d** · June 15th, 2008

I see..

I do not know about my router, at all.

But I have now come into a problem, Transmission has said that all my ports are closed. I need one open for torrents?

**Tom--d** · June 15th, 2008

Right, I know what the problem is with Transmission.

I need the port open for it, at the moment, its closed. I don't know what. And with ufw, that port is set to allow. but it is still closed :S

**wariskampar** · June 15th, 2008

I dont know about Transmission because I use Deluge which I'm very much satisfy with the speed. Maybe you can try my setting though;
1) Setup Static IP (i use default Network Manager to do that)
2) Create new policy for torrent in Firestarter (GUI for ufw) - the steps are pretty straight forward.
3) Setup Router to open torrent port (as configured in Network Manager) and you will need to use Static IP here
4) Test open port in Deluge (in your case Transmission)

I dont know these info help but hope it might shed some light. Success!