Transmission: Can't connect to Tracker

[vilane]

SOLUTION Don't use Comcast DNS servers. They are blocking public torrent trackers in DNS.

hello all, I've been running my Freenas 9.3 stable build for about 4 months now (love it!) and I recently moved to a new apartment. The first major change at the new apartment was that I started using a new router (sonicwall tz100) and that I threw in the towel on changing the subnet addressing to use 192.168.1.0 instead of it's default 192.168.168.0. I believe that I went through and updated all the necessary static IP assignments for my jails and the Freenas host itself in the sonicwall. I can't seem to find any other sections in the Freenas where it has any 192.168.1.xxx addresses anymore, so I may have that completed too.

port forwarding: I created the necessary UDP and TCP service objects in the sonicwall for Transmission (using port 52444) and have them translated from the WAN to the Static for the Transmission Jail. From the Jail, I can ping 1 of 2 of the trackers on a torrent currently where I am getting the connection failed. I had checked the /etc/resolv.conf to ensure my DNS was set correctly, and I have 2 comcast DNS points and my router as the nameservers. Transmission interface is configured for port 52444 for peers and to not randomly assign a port on boot. When I look at the "port test" in transmission it tells me the port is closed, so this leads me to believe that maybe the port forwarding for the service objects is still not making it? I have it configured correctly as far as I can tell from the sonicwall as my Sickrage ports pass through perfectly using the same duplicated rules with different ports. I tried the "swap the port back and forth" trick to force the trackers to try and re-announce, but no joy.

to further complicate the jail, I have an openvpn tunnel active, which is working and is active (noted by some torrents still working correctly despite the tracker snafu, likely because of the PEX settings in Transmission maybe) but I will still get connection issues to trackers. I have tried changing around my VPN tunnel endpoint server to various USA sites to test if it was a blocklisted ip from the VPN service with the trackers, but that hasn't bore any fruit either.

Suggestions? Thoughts? Assistance?

Anything would be much appreciated guys/gals. The system isn't really down or non-functional, it's just partially working and a lot slower than it should be.

Thanks so much in advance.

 

[Nick2253]

Not being able to ping a tracker does not mean they are not accessible. Many (if not most) trackers do not respond to ICMP ping packets as an obscuring measure.

Try a public torrent, like a Linux distro download, to see if you are still running in to problems. That helps us rule out temporary issues due to a particular torrent or tracker.

Also, if you are torrenting over a VPN, your port settings in your SonicWALL are irrelevant (at least as far as Transmission is concerned).

 

[vilane]

Hey Nick,

I just tried a wget of an ubuntu distro that I was similarly not able to connect to the tracker on. Torrent I pulled was http://releases.ubuntu.com/15.04/ubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent with a wget into my watch folder. Transmission grabbed it, and queued it, I forced it to start, and it tried the announce and failed to connect to http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969 for the announce.

The VPN tunnel is up, so at this point I am feeling like all signs point there for a potential port block that isn't routing to me. Does that sound reasonable? I can try reaching out to my VPN host which is IPVanish.com to see what the deal is.

 

[vilane]

I am continuing to update this as I work with it...

I found this in my console after a reboot of the FreeNAS while working on this. Could be innocuous, but I'm not sure.

Sep 11 12:44:01 denmother manage.py: [freeadmin.navtree:627] An error occurred while unserializing from http://192.168.168.170:8085/plugins/transmission/1/_s/treemenu: No JSON object could be decoded

I reached out to the VPN provider, all they really told me is to ensure that PPTP and L2TP passthrough is enabled and then gave me all of the valid connection ports that they allow with OpenVPN and other VPN connection methods. I have now added all of the ports into the SonicWALL as service objects and created the necessary NAT policies to forward the ports to the transmission jail (I feel as if the OpenVPN is establishing a connection but then is not receiving any data packets from the VPN because the incoming communication ports are getting blocked). Did a full reboot on the FreeNAS and the router to be thorough, and I am still getting a failed to connect, even with the Ubuntu tracker/torrent.

 

[Nick2253]

You've potentially got two things going wrong here: your VPN provider and Transmission. Also, it could be that your new ISP in the apartment is throttling or blocking one or more ports/protocols.

Since you said you were opening ports on your firewall for Transmission, but you're using Transmission over a VPN, I want to make sure we are on the same page here.

Assuming you're using Transmission 100% over a VPN, you do not need to forward any Transmission specific ports in your firewall. Also, you also shouldn't need to forward any ports on your firewall for a VPN connection either, since the VPN connection is initiated from behind the firewall out to the Internet (as opposed to being initiated from the Internet to you).

Your problem could be do to your SonicWALL dropping VPN traffic, but I doubt that's it.

I would do the following to test the situation:

• Download a VPN client on your desktop, connect to your VPN provider, and attempt to browse the internet. Is that working?
• Download a VPN client on your desktop, connect to your VPN provider, and try to download a torrent. Is that working?
• Configure Transmission to not use your VPN provider, and try to download a torrent. Is that working?

If the first two work, it's probably a problem with Transmission. If only the last one works, it's probably a problem with your VPN. If none of them work, your problem might be your ISP or your firewall config. If they all work, you've probably got a problem with the Transmission configuration.

 

[vilane]

Thanks Nick, I will do some more testing with this once I get home. I can SSL VPN back to my apartment to poke and prod the Freenas from work, but I can't exactly test the VPN client downloads/torrent from here, so I'll just wait.

To further clarify the Transmission 100% VPN bit: On startup of my Transmission jail, I have a scriplet launch as part of the process that opens my OpenVPN connection and a script that also runs after that to constantly check that I have a connected status on the tun0 adapter. If that tun0 adapter fails to show online, the script sets my inet address on the bridged connection from the FreeNAS host to the loopback so that I will not leak traffic of any of my torrents in or out when the tunnel drops. So when Transmission is up and running, it would 100% be through the OpenVPN tunnel.

Again, I'll test out all of the scenarios you listed above so we can try and narrow the field. Thanks again for the help.

 

[vilane]

Alright, so from testing:

1 - OpenVPN from desktop worked fine web browsing
2 - OpenVPN torrent to desktop worked fine with ubuntu iso
3 - Set up a brand new transmission jail and made a new watch folder. wget and watch worked, connected to tracker and downloaded like a boss.

So my original transmission jail is the problem. Something with it must be hosed, but at least now I have a place to start.

I can attempt rebuilding a new jail and remaking all of the scripting if you feel that is necessary, or we can work with the configs of what's there if you or anyone is able to look under the hood with me.

 

[JJT211]

I had a very similar problem a while back when I changed my LAN ip from a 192.168.x.x to a 10.1.x.x

Im not sure of the exact issue, but I wound up deleting all of my jails, even the actual jail dataset. But just the jails though, not any of my media or data. I unmounted the storages prior to deleting and reconfiguring everything. I think it had something to do with the main jail config. I dunno, but everything worked like normal afterwards and wasnt as bad I thought it would.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Hmm, actually I noticed something the other day when creating a FreeNAS system with jails on one subnet then deploying it on another subnet.
The /etc/resolv.conf wasn't updated so DNS wasn't working in the the old jails. Maybe this one of those locations that needs to be updated with IP changes?

 

[vilane]

Interestingly enough, the /etc/resolv.conf in the transmission_1 jail is correct still. I did have to change an entry from 192.168.1.xxx to the 192.168.168.xxx but the other two entries were still before it and were correct still (comcast 75.75.75.75 and 75.75.76.76).

When I spawned a new transmission_2 jail, it auto assigned a "default" IP from somewhere and chose 192.168.1.125 despite the fact that I had already changed the new default gateway etc on the host config to 192.168.168.168. Something in the configs that isn't apparent in the webgui still must be trying to use the old subnet. where would I be looking in the old transmission_1 jail for IP settings? the FreeNAS webgui has a static bound ipv4 using the 192.168.168.xxx, so i would have thought that would have taken care of it.

JJT211, how would I go about umounting the data from the jail and just blowing away the configs? I would imagine that simply deleting the jail would not erase the mounted data from the host that gets mapped to it's local storage right? at this point I'm willing to give anything a shot really as the transmission jail isn't downloading a single torrent anymore. my original statement of "kind of working" must have just been some weird fluke where I had completed/seeded torrents that I hadn't purged yet.

UPDATE
I boot up the old jail so I could dump all the "active" torrents from transmission and let sickrage scrape them again once I get the jail straightened out. As I am going to start clearing them out, they start actively pulling down. Granted, trackers still report that they cannot connect, but I have anywhere from 1-3 seeds on each and only 2 torrents have a single peer download. I assume that this is all coming from "Peer Exchange" and "DHT" connection type allowances but I am just baffled that this even works without being able to talk to the tracker. I suppose I will let them keep downloading, but I won't be adding any new torrents at least for now. I will still want to try and clean this up so the trackers work properly.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

correct, deleting the jail would not delete mounted data.

 

[vilane]

Any of the data and scripts that I added to the jail however I would anticipate will be blown away. Not a major loss as I can always rebuild them.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

yup, also any current torrents settings would be lost... unless you save your data directory. that's at /var/db/transmission for the latest version, but was in a different place for previous versions

 

[Jailer]

When I spawned a new transmission_2 jail, it auto assigned a "default" IP from somewhere and chose 192.168.1.125 despite the fact that I had already changed the new default gateway etc on the host config to 192.168.168.168.

Did you change the network settings on the jails->configuration tab? You'll have to select Advanced Mode to see the network settings.

 

[vilane]

Good catch Jailer, I hadn't thought to look there. Updated the IP settings and gave the whole system a reboot for good measure to refresh all the network leases from the jail config update, still getting the tracker connection issues along with everything else checking out green across the board.

I may opt to just build a totally new transmission jail for clean configs and rebuild my vpn and scripts into it. I used guides/solutions/tutorials that others had posted here on the forums to make those work anyways.

 

[JJT211]

JJT211, how would I go about umounting the data from the jail and just blowing away the configs? I would imagine that simply deleting the jail would not erase the mounted data from the host that gets mapped to it's local storage right? at this point I'm willing to give anything a shot really as the transmission jail isn't downloading a single torrent anymore. my original statement of "kind of working" must have just been some weird fluke where I had completed/seeded torrents that I hadn't purged yet.

No it shouldnt erase any of your data, all it really does is save you the trouble recreating it....no biggie really

Under Jails>Storage uncheck the mounted box and when you delete it stays. After you recreate jails/plugins, just go back and tick mounted box and evrything should be g2g.

I may opt to just build a totally new transmission jail for clean configs and rebuild my vpn and scripts into it. I used guides/solutions/tutorials that others had posted here on the forums to make those work anyways.

Yea, its actually faster to just reinstall jail rather than trying to troubleshoot some small unknown detail.

 

[vilane]

Alright, so I spent some time this morning blowing away the jail and building it up fresh. Trackers still fail to connect :(

Things that I changed from the base install of the plugin/jail were adding openvpn with my credentials and having it execute as a service and implementing the Update_Bind.sh script that pro_trouble wrote https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...en-using-pia-i-e-creating-a-killswitch.27640/

I'm at a loss now. Either something in transmission isn't configured correctly or there is still some form of firewalling going on that is blocking communication with the jails.

 

[JJT211]

Have you tried Transmission before configuring OpenVPN? You need to figure out if its a jail or OpenVPN issue.

Just a thought, as its happened to me before, if you're using something password.txt based like PIA, make sure that your user and passwords dont have any empty spaces at the end when cutting and pasting.

 

[vilane]

I was able to solve this this morning. My coworker suggested I try changing my DNS, so I did.

Comcast DNS servers are blocking communication with known public torrent trackers. Period. I switched my /etc/resolv.conf over to use Google's, instantly was getting connected to trackers and pulling/pushing.

I'll update the first post.

 

[Jailer]

That's good to know and thanks for the update.