the forums at degreez.net

Port triggering is another story. The main difference is, port forwarding opens up the ports anytime anything asks for access on the forwarded ports. Port triggering allows you to specify which ports will be allowed to access the triggered ports. In the case of Bittorrent, you can set it to only allow ports 6881-6899 to trigger your router to open your ports. I used to have it set up to port forward, until I looked at my Zone Alarm firewall alerts and saw that I was getting upwards of 3 access attempts per minute. Not a good thing. Port triggering is the way to go, port forwarding is not.

Port forwarding isn't a security risk at all unless you are running vulnerable services that are listening on the forwarded ports to begin with.

That's correct, bytetorrent. Also, if you're running supplemental security software like ZoneAlarm (once they fix the friggin' thing, that is), it'll also stealth the port for you while the client isn't running -- though in most cases portscans won't be searching that range anyway.

I would always prefer port forwarding rather than port triggering, as there is no fixed remote port bittorrent uses. A client could listen on any port, the same for the tracker. Sure, most people use the default port range, but it's not a must. Also, afaik, port triggering will not work if you want to open ports for more than on computer with the same trigger ports.

If you really want to open the ports as long as bittornado runs, use UPnP.

I'm running Zone Alarm, and when I don't have port forwarding enabled on my Linksys router, I don't get any alerts. However, in the time since my computer has been on this morning (around , the number of alerts has gone from 620 to 1,622. And every single one of them has had a target port of 6881. And I didn't have my client running either. Is there any way I can configure it so that my ports aren't getting bombarded?

I meant to say "around 8", but the forum converted it to a smiley.