SOCKS-5 proxy connections for both tracker and p2p?

[resist0r]

I still do not get it. You can get Socks support with Vuze, but not with Transmission?

Correct. (You can get SOCKS conections to trackers, of course, but not to peers.)

So it is doable, but nobody can develop it?

It's a stupid thing to do, so nobody who actually understands what they're doing is going to implement it.

--jch

Looking to revive this thread after almost a year... I decided to go with TorGuard with SOCKS5 to proxy my torrent usage and testing with netstat show that ALL connections go through the SOCKS5 proxy. Putting aside the debate as to whether or not this idea is dumb, the empirical evidence shows that it works well. I'm consistently able to get download rates of 8Mbps or more for medium to large swarm torrents.

Now, granted having all of your traffic run through a proxy may seem "dumb", and not within the spirit of the BitTorrent protocol, it seems to me that privacy trumps architectural purity, and moreover given a proxy with 1) enough nodes, and 2) enough bandwidth, it shouldn't affect the swarm all that much. Perhaps it'll create a bottleneck at the pairing point my proxy provider's backbone connection, but hopefully if they are smart they are working those issues out and will stay ahead of the bandwidth curve.

Anyway, Transmission has always been my favorite bt client to use, but now that I got my first letter from my ISP for downloading, I have to use a privacy service--and since Transmission doesn't support proxies I have to say goodbye. It pains me, please bring back SOCKS5 support for both trackers, and add support for peers like uTorrent. Anybody else using VPNs for privacy is essentially doing the same thing to the swarm: all traffic is routing through a fixed set of nodes--but I contend that a VPN is inferior because ALL your connections go through your one VPN gateway. This is opposed to a SOCKS5 proxy where some if not all P2P connections went through a different node. (At the time of writing, proxy.torguard.tg has 64 IP addresses in its pool.)

What say you JCH, have you come around on your thinking of removing proxy support?

[quaff]

Looking to revive this thread after almost a year... I decided to go with TorGuard with SOCKS5 to proxy my torrent usage and testing with netstat show that ALL connections go through the SOCKS5 proxy. Putting aside the debate as to whether or not this idea is dumb, the empirical evidence shows that it works well.

I think the issue is that there's no way for proxies to do p2p transfer properly. You may be able to download through a proxy, but there's no way for others to download from you (from what I can tell, the uTP protocol). Not without exposing your IP address to the peer. Having a half baked solution makes Transmission a bad torrent client to trackers and users.

I suspect the reason for not having proxy support for just trackers (which works 100% from what I can tell) is so there's no false sense of safety for users who need 100%.

I've been looking into this myself the past week, and the best way to hide your IP address from peers is via VPN.


EDIT: In case anyone is interested, I started a new enhancement ticket for to re-open dialog regarding proxy support: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/5625