Topic: LOTS of connection problems for everyone! - page 2. (Read 11531 times)

iv never had over 8 connections at once. i normally sit around 4.

cypherdoc,

UPnP is technology for automatic port forwarding. It's meant to open ports on a remote device(your case router). Unfortunately, not all devices support it.
In your case, we did it manually so you should leave it off.

On a 32bit system you do something like:


cyrus1985, you can find fallback nodes on our wiki
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fallback_Nodes

thanks for those ip addresses. adding the nodes to the config worked for me.

I wonder why this happens in the first place, shouldn't the bitcoin client cache previously discovered peers, so that it can find them again if IRC is down or some other problem occurs?
(and where do you have those ip addresses from?)

if i'm using win 7 on my macbook to connect to my home external ip would i want to check UPnP or not?  does UPnP open up a specific port on my laptop for client?

what r the terminal commands to -addnode in win 7 from vmware fusion?

Well, I suspect your bitcoin.conf is not being read for whatever reason, but I'm out of ideas at the moment

no, it is, i just didn't want to show my name

That's probably the problem. It should be in /Users/[your username]/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/

where do i cd to?  bitcoin.conf is where it usually is:  Library/Application Support/Bitcoin

Could you open terminal and change directory(cd) to where you put your bitcoin.conf. Then type:


Post the output of both commands

however i must say that i get an immediate 124 connections when i open the client with terminal addnode commands from my dedicated 8333 port mac desktop at home vs. 24 connections when i open with the bitcoin.conf file.

We learned a very important difference between word processor and text editor 

i think i might finally be able to contribute something to this conversation after mewantsbitcoins helped me greatly understand whats going on.

for those of you wishing to use the bitcoin.conf file to addnodes instead of terminal -addnode commands i think the trouble we're having is with the TextEdit on the mac and possibly Notepad on Windows.  In TextEdit, the default settings are Rich Text Format and changing to plain text is not as simple as it sounds.  check out this link and follow the instructions carefully before creating addnode commands.  http://support.apple.com/kb/TA20406

after changing the preferences settings you need to close and reopen TextEdit before the changes are recorded.  only then can you save a file as Unicode (UTF plain text.  this has improved my connections markedly.  the 8333 port connection has helped tremendously per mewantsbitcoins.  i am a much happier person now 

Matt Corallo had a Windows binary to probe ports. You should ask him - he may have one for OS X too. But if you are getting more than 8 connections, that means it's working.
To see if your clients on macbook on Win7 are connecting to your desktop you can look in debug.log file. Simpler way is to just leave these clients off for a while. Once you launch it again, it should start downloading the blockchain immediately. If so, everything's working

is there a program or easy way to tell that my home client is porting to 8333 as desired and more importantly is there a way to tell if my macbook client is detecting my home external IP via the .conf file?

Seems to take a long time to get connections, when starting up the app on a mac.  but if I turn on generate I get a connection a little quicker

I think that's it. You won't be getting more than 8 connections if you can't bind your clients to 8333 port. If you have your external IP in .conf file this will allow your clients on Macbook and Win7 to instantly download the blockchain from your Mac desktop even if that's the only connection.
I would remove noirc=1 from .conf. If you leave it there it disables IRC peer discovery method. When you take your macbook with you to another network where you have access to port 8333, you'll benefit from being able to use this method.

1. This setting is for people who use proxies. The example "proxy=127.0.0.1:9050" is the way bitcoin can be used on Tor. Localhost acts like router/proxy.
2. Already mentioned - IRC peer discovery method
3. Is for controlling Bitcoin via Jason-RPC

so what i've done is tunneled my mac desktop at home to port 8333 and getting decent 12 connections while keeping empty client open and always connected with updated blockchain.  i'm using macbook pro with both macOS and win7 clients which have coins addnoding to this home external IP address.  am trying to get .conf to work since it should connect on client startup w/o laborious terminal commands however only getting 3 connections.  questions below
from the wiki regarding .conf file that i haven't seen mentioned on the thread:

 1.# Connect via a socks4 proxy
 #proxy=127.0.0.1:9050

 2.# Do not use Internet Relay Chat (irc.lfnet.org #bitcoin channel) to
 # find other peers.
 #noirc=1

3. # Listen for RPC connections on this TCP port:
 rpcport=8332

are these suggestions still applicable?

this is whats in my .conf which is in the right place:
addnode=70.177.29.71
addnode=69.164.218.197
addnode=178.79.147.99
addnode=64.22.103.150
addnode=109.75.176.226
addnode=99.27.237.13
noirc=1

Good morning
1. Yes, you can use walllet.dat on Linux, OS X and Windows
2. Depends on OS and "what kind of sleep" but generally yes.
3. That is a good question. What OS are you on at the moment? If it's mac, did you put it in
I copied the whole sample code from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin . Alter settings to your needs. It worked well for me.

Good Morning mewants:
1.is the wallet.dat interchangeable btwn mac and pc clients?
2.when my desktop sleeps does it disconnect from internet?
3.what am i doing wrong with the bitcoin.conf file?  using Wordpad in plain text mode to addnode=*** IP addresses but doesn't seem to be working.  the .conf method is simpler than opening terminal commands since it should automatically run when opening client.

Bitcoin client has several ways to discover nodes. One is - it connects to IRC and queries other nodes in the same channel for their IP addresses. Once it knows the IP addresses, it tries to connect to them on 8333 port. If the port is closed, it cannot connect to that node. It is not a big problem because there are other ways that Bitcoin client can connect to the network. For example, it has inbuild list of reliable nodes and these 8 connections are usually the ones. You can also specify nodes manually with -addnode= switch like we did earlier.
The real problems begin in certain circumstances. For example when port 8333 is closed + reliable nodes are down/have to many connections/exceeded their bandwith. So you can see that in some cases even if you are connected to the network you have to wait a long time before you can update your blockchain.
For more info on how to run multiple clients on a home network using different ports read this: http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=589.0
I personally chose another strategy. I opened 8333 and forwarded to one of my computers, which is on most of the time. Now whenever I want to use a client on another computer, I just start it with -addnode=my external IP. What this does, is connects it to that computer which is on most of the time. Since it has up to date blockchain and my client on the other computer doesn't have to wonder halfway around the globe looking for nodes, download starts immediately.