Motorola SBG900 and BitTorrent
23 01 2006We finally joined the 21st century in mid-2005 when we signed up to Telstra BigPond Cable broadband. I had been trying to get ADSL for some time, but despite living ridiculously close to an exchange, all attempts had ended in vain. I opted for the wireless option, which included a Motorola SBG900 modem/router, agreed by many on Whirlpool forums to be a more than adequate device. Originally all the computers in the house connected wirelessly, with Chewbacca (my old Celeron 1000, now relegated to file server and download-monkey) using the Telstra-supplied Netgear WG111 802.11g USB dongle.
From day one, I had intermittent problems with using BitTorrent. Almost immediately upon beginning a download, the router would drop the connection and restart. Often this also occured a number of times during a download - not a good thing to happen when you’ve just reached 100+ KB/s, as the torrent would restart and would take a while to reach a decent speed again. To make matters worse, Chewbacca would occasionally restart spontaneously, killing the download for good. All of this caused me great frustration, but (for lack of time or desire) I was never able to pin down a cause. Med school holidays finally gave me enough of the former, and I managed to solve the mystery.
Finding a solution to the problem was ellusive, but finally I pieced together an answer. The SBG900 has both a problem with too many open connections over wireless, and a too-quick opening of multiple connections. If some magic number is exceeded, the router gives up and reboots.
The best functional solution is to forgo wireless on the computer doing the torrenting, as this will allow maximum speeds with the most number of connections. Once Chewy was plugged directly into the router, I suddenly began seeing individual torrents exceed 350 KB/s (something I’d never witnessed before). On top of this, I could finally run multiple torrents without crashing either the router or PC (or both), allowing me to max out my 10 Mb/s cable connection if desired. For me, getting rid of the wireless component wasn’t a problem because at around the same time, Chewy became a media centre PC and was moved into the living room, where the cable modem was connected.
For those wishing to continue using the SBG900 to wirelessly download torrents, I’m afraid the answer is a little less satisfying. The only thing that helped me, was to significantly reduce the maximum number of connections in my torrent program (uTorrent). The side-effect of this is significantly slower downloads, and/or fewer simultaneous downloads. Solving the modem restart on commencing a download required reducing the rate of new connections. Unfortunately, neither of these solved the problem entirely, and occasional restarts still occurred.
In uTorrent, I made the following configuration changes:
- Global maximum: 80
- Max per torrent: 80
- Max number active torrents: 1
- Advanced -> bt.connect_speed = 16
The logic behind this configuration is that the number of active connections is proportional to download speed. This therefore maximises download speed for one torrent download at a time, but it doesn’t allow simultaneous downloads. As you can see, this is a very sub-optimal solution, but for infrequent downloads may be just what the doctor ordered.
If any readers have found better settings to use, please submit a comment and I will update this post.
Good call - check here for more people discussing the problem. What crap that Motorola doesn’t offer direct firmware updates. I can’t find any at least.
Thanks!
This was extremely helpful, had similar problems as the author, and acheived the sames resolution.
Yeh the wireless thing cannot be ‘fixed’, I even emailed Motorola about it and they had no answer basically. With a wired connection fine, but if you are using say, Chewbacca in your room with the router connected up to your pay TV service in the living room, then Chewbacca will not be able to communicate with his ape-like computer language.
I am spewing how they havent released a new firmware update about this, or at least update the modem to fix this issue. Telstra I believe are still using this. Great modem I find, just really bad for torrents.
More than a year on since my original article, this issue is still effectively unresolved.
Since then, I have retired Chewbacca and replaced him with a small HP e-Vectra (”Yoda”). Being smaller than a VCR and almost silent, Yoda serves the dual function of torrent downloader and video streamer far better than Chewy ever did.
(Readers will be happy to know that not all computers in this household carry Star Wars names. The latest addition to our silicon family is Garfield - desktop and wireless print and media server.)
(Yes, I am a little nuts.)
does this help (I just posted this on the whirlpool forum website);
hi all, i think i may have sorted this one out..
I am writing this purely from the perspective of having a SBG900 modem and using the wireless signal to connect to a laptop for torrent downloads. my aim was to get no SBG900 modem reboots, with an adequate torrent download speed on my wireless laptop.
here’s my setup;
- Telstra cable (Australia)
- Motorola SBG900 wireless modem
- running Utorrent
known configuration (i’ve been changing a number of modem and utorrent settings, here’s what I found);
- firewall set to NONE in the modem admin page (if it’s set to any of the other active settings, eg low, medium, or high - torrent downloads are non existent). this is the very first setting you need to change. don’t worry about security, NAT takes care of that on the modem (when enabled it hides your devices from the internet), just make sure you have a subscription to a third-party software firewall and antivirus (eg, Live OneCare).
- Utorrent; \preferences\connection tab\listening-port section - it appears that all of the settings here can be checked (ie, enabled). Infact, in unchecking them, I found, could be detrimental (except for the randomise port option, I see no benefit of enabling this one).
- related to the above setting, contrary to info on portforward.com - I do not believe that a port forward is essential for Utorrent. I initially thought it was as I was not getting any downloads above 1kps - but it is not required, the solution was to just turn the modem’s firewall off. So, having intially setup a static local IP on my wireless laptop, now I am back to DHCP and all is running fine. remember to take any existing port-forward settings off your modem (or just disable the setting) - also clear out your IP lease if going from static back to DHCP; reboot the modem and your pc.
- if I had the port forward enabled on the modem, it would reboot every 2mins as soon as torrents began. now with the firewall off, no port-forward, and DHCP on my laptop - things are running fine. the only exception is the exclamation mark diagram in the Utorrent status bar - but otherwise all appears fine - no more SBG900 modem reboots (which appears to be solely due to the modem port-forward to the wireless device that is actively running the torrents).
last tip - if your provider counts uploads (like Telstra cable), set the max upload speed within Utorrent to 6kps, anything less and your download speeds are limited. it’s the best balance you’ll get - unrestricted download speeds, but uploads limited to 6kps.
i’ve only been testing these settings for a few hours today now - but taking off the port-forwarding has definitely helped. am on the lookout for modem reboots - but none so far (ie, no guarantees as this is early testing). you’ll more than likely get blistering utorrent download speeds if you connect a network cable directly from your modem to the pc; but I’m posting this hopefully so others can get a good balance on their wireless pc for torrents. also, portforwarding is probably the way to go with some modems, but it appears this is not the case for the SBG900.
good luck!
sirmacca.
Sirmacca - you’re a legend. Been having the same problems with uTorrent and the SBG900, and reducing the settings on the firewall has done the trick.
With hindsight, it seems such an obvious resolution. But the information on portforward.com, which everyones holds up as the be-all and end-all of this sort of thing was so very convincing…..
Having burnt so many hours trying to figure out the whole port forwarding fiasco, I am loathe to remove those settings, but will get around to it at some point.
Cheers!
Simon
Sirmacca
Thanks for your instruction mate. I did every possible things I can to set up Utorrent runing on my SBG900. Nop, not working. I cant’ get downloaded.
Your trick to turn the firewall off on the modem works like a trick.
Cheers, Chris
Yes, thank you sirmacca. Not really a ’solution’, but at least you can tolerate torrent downloads on this modem.
Hi,
I’ve tried doing what sirmacca suggested and go into my modem’s admin page by typing 192.168.0.1 but it won’t load even after typing in the generic admin name and password.
What could be the problem here, and how would I go about solving it?