bittorrent in core? what frontend?

[Michael A. Peters]

On Sat, 2005-12-17 at 04:45 -0500, Sean wrote:
> On Sat, December 17, 2005 3:53 am, Michael A. Peters said:
> 
> > Users behind NAT isn't a Fedora problem. They need to port forward the
> > BT ports - but that can go on something like fedorafaq.org (or whatever
> > it is).
> 
> Well Fedora could help the situation by making sure its default bt client
> supports UPnP so that a compliant nat router (like most linksys) will
> automatically be configured without the user needing to deal with it at
> all.

I would NOT want that.
I've got that turned off on my Linksys - I don't want any ports at all
open for forwarding that I haven't specifically opened for forwarding.

Last thing I want is someone at my house running some program that opens
up port forwarding on my router. 

> 
> > Firewall is a problem. A nice gui like firestarter (not necessarily
> > firestarter, but something like it) for configuring the Fedora Firewall
> > would be nice - with common app/port selections so users don't
> > necessarily have to care what port ranges are used for what (unless they
> > want to meddle with the defaults)
> >
> > until I decided to go with Linksys for my router, firestarter is what I
> > used for NAT - it has a really nice interface for controlling what ports
> > are allowed in etc.
> 
> It would be nice if the user just had to answer a simple question like
> "Would you like to open the ports needed for BT in your firewall
> configuration?".

That has to be done as root, so it has to either be in Anaconda - or in
a system-config tool. I personally vote for the latter, I think Anaconda
is too complicated as it is. OS X (at least 10.1 - haven't installed
anything later) has a sweet and simple installer. But anyway, that's
just my opinion. Linus Torvalds will probably tear me a new one for
wanting an installer targeted at dumb users ;)

> 
> The same problem exists when trying to configure many other network apps
> too.   It would be great to have a general framework for apps to request
> open ports from the firewall and have the user just get a popup so that
> she can agree or cancel.  Perhaps this could all be done over dbus?  Does
> something like this already exist?

The problem with that is that root is required.
I know some Windows firewalls do that - but only if you are running as
admin.