From: Gary Britt 

Hey Geo,  got a p2p type question for you and the others here. Recently,
I've been playing with bittorrent to do some downloading of a couple of
things.  I've been considering two issues that maybe you could help me be
clear on.

1.  Bittorrent works without setting up any special port forwarding in the
router, but I've seen some people recommend setting up port forwarding in
the router and also seen recommendations to cause bit torrent to use
something other than the default range of ports which starts at 6881 and
goes to 6999.

  A.  Should one setup port forwarding in their router?

  B.  Should one use a port range other than the default?


2.  I've seen some paranoid types  wanting to try and avoid being tracked
by the government or RIAA or MPAA recommend the use of a program like Peer
Guardian 2 to block certain IP packets and connections that could be bad in
these regards.

  A.  Do you think someone should use Peer Guardian 2 or some other
similar program with bittorrent?  How bad does this program affect overall
performance of the computer and other uses of the internet by other
programs?

  B.  Why couldn't you just add the "bad" IP addresses to the Hosts
file?  Or does the Hosts file not block IP addresses accessed by programs
other than IE and Firefox??

Thanks to you and all for any info.

Gary

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