Free Help Setting up Your Router or Firewall Set up your router from home
Home Guides Reviews Store Support Forum Requests
see list of routers and firewalls below

Firewalling for the McAfee Security Center






 

Before we can open ports for BitTorrent, we should set the ports that BitTorrent uses. Here is a brief walkthrough on how to do that. Go ahead and open up BitTorrent.



In the menu at the top of your screen, click the View link. Then in the list of options that drops down click the Settings option.



A new window should have poped up that looks like the picture above. There are a few tabs at the top of this window, click the Network tab.



The number in the starting at port box tells BitTorrent where you start looking for open ports. BitTorrent works it's way up from that port number until it finds a port that is open. Every port that BitTorrent has to check takes time. So it would be a good idea to open the port that you enter into the Starting at Port box. Many ISPs block ports in the 6000 range. Please choose a port between 10000 and 60000 then enter it into the Starting at Port box. Then enter that port into the box below.

BitTorrent's Port for incoming connections

If you plan on downloading multiple files at the same time via BitTorrent, you need to open up one port for each file. This guide will show you how to open up one port for each file. If you chose to put port 12540 into the Starting at Port box and wanted to have five files going at the same time, you should open ports 12540 to 12544.




Open up the McAfee Security Center. Then click Internet & Network which is located right in the middle of that window.


To the right of the Internet & Network area click the configure link.


Click the Firewall protection is enabled bar on the right side of this window.


Now click the Advanced button in the Firewall protection is enabled panel.


By default McAfee allows all traffic in and out of your computer for the programs it thinks are okay. I prefer to have McAfee tell me which programs it is allowing traffic for before it does it. So I have set the security level to Tight. I would recomind that you do the same. I have also disabled the Smart Recomindations option. The "smart" recomindation is to only allow the programs you need and use to connect the internet. Relying upon McAfee to guess which programs those are wouldn't be very smart. If you made the changes above, you would see something like the following screen pop up when you opened a newly installed program.


Go ahead and hit Apply if you have made any changes here. Then click the Program Permissions link in the menu on the left hand side of the window.


Find BitTorrent in the Program Permissions list and click it to highlight it. McAfee does not allow you to determine exactly which ports BitTorrent uses. So you've got a couple choices here. You can Grant Full Access, which allows all traffic in and out of your computer to this program. You should only use that option when BitTorrent is acting as a server. You can Grant Outbound-Only Access which allows BitTorrent to connect to the internet, but does not allow the internet to connect to BitTorrent. The other choice is to prevent BitTorrent from connecting to the internet by clicking the Block Access Option. All of these actions are provided in a list at the lower right of your screen. When you are done click the Ok button all the way back to the main menu.