uTorrent causes router loss of DNS connectivety

Occasionally (every 4 or so hours) my router loses DNS connectivety (or the ability to forward my dns inquires). This only seems to happen when I am downloading torrents, so I assume it is related. I use "uTorrent" as my client. I've experienced this same phenomenon on three different types of routers now over the past year or so. It's something I've battled with quite a few times.

If anyone else has experience with this specific problem (routers

+torrents=dead dns) I'd love to hear your thoughts! Am I just overwhelming these puny cheapo $30 routers? I read something about the router NAT tables getting overwhelmed then disrupting DNS, anyone have more info about this? Will a better router solve my problems?

More Details:

- I'm not a complete moron (meaning: the router is plugged in & turned on, etc etc!)

- On the router(s) I set port forwarding correctly for the torrent software.

- This loss of DNS connectivety affects all LAN computers at the same time, regardless of if they are wired or wireless.

- It happens every 1-10 hours randomly, usually when the router is under a fair amount of stress (overheating???).

- All computers retain LAN and WAN conectivety; meaning I can still connect to my shared folders & my torrents are still moving.

- Running NSLOOKUP from dos confirms there is no DNS connectivety.

- I cannot connect to the router via the browser when this is hapenning

- I've experienced this on 3 different routers: a DLink WBR-1310 Wireless, a Gigafast WF719-CAPR Wireless, and some unknown 4 port Dlink wired.

- Note: all three routers were "cheapo" models.

- Main computer is running Xp Home and the torrent software.

- I have tried both dynamic and static IPs and DNS settings on the Xp Home machine.

- I have tried both Zonealarm and Sygate Firewalls. I dont use WinXP's Firewall. I've tried disabling all firewalls completely.

- I have tried lowering the maximum amount of connections uTorrent can make, down to 20.

Below are two similar (unsolved) posts I found on google:

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Any thoughts would be appreciated. I'd like to know exactly what's happening here.

Reply to
dennispublic
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The only thing I've seen work somewhat reliably is reducing the number of concurrent connections you allow. This is different than the number of active torrents. The reason (as I've seen it) is that if you let an unlimited number of connections occur, you actually DO overwhelm your router and it begins to hiccup.

A small word of warning about downloading torrents though... Most torrent sites (possibly all) record your IP when you connect to a torrent and that data gets added to "trackers." The next client that accesses that torrent will receive a list of IP addresses known to have all or part of the file, and will attempt to connect to you to get a piece.

If you access a popular torrent file, this can quickly snowball into a LOT of requests being sent your way. This can interfere slightly with your available bandwidth.

If your router supports logging, take a look at all the incoming connection requests on the port you use for torrent transfers.

Reply to
Ryan P.

Just to ensure it's not your ISP sucking or your router overheating or something like that why not try a different torrent client?

Also how long does this inability to do DNS lookups last? Or what do you do to resolve the issue?

Reply to
kingthorin

I experience the same thing very infrequently and I use Azureus.

Tom

Reply to
Tom Hall

snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com wrote on 8 Feb 2007 23:35:15 -0800:

Whenever I've experienced this, the solution has been to change the PC DNS servers to those of my ISP. In the routers I've used in the past (all of them Netgear), if you have the option enabled to automatically get the DNS servers then the DHCP settings cause the PCs on the LAN to use a DNS Proxy on the router itself, which very quickly gets overwhelmed when using a torrent client. By setting the PC to use the ISP DNS directly (or in the case of a Netgear router by turning off the "Get DNS from ISP automatically" option and instead entering the DNS server addresses themselves, which them results in those addresses being passed out via DHCP) I no longer saw DNS resolution problems with my routers.

While I have no experience of the routers you are using, I'd suggest giving it a shot. These cheap devices have very little RAM and little processing power, and trying to maintain a large DNS cache just seems beyond them when the rest of the system is trying to use those resources too.

Dan

Reply to
Spack

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