mini tutorial: how i finally got green happy faces in azureus with two routers

the holiday season, and more vacation days then i knew what to do with, left me with some free time recently. i decided to take another stab and improving my torrent download speeds. having two routers complicates things a bit.

if you are reading this and are in my situation (dealing with frustration of two routers), check out portfoward.com before you read any further. that site even has a page talking about working with two routers, but i was just not clicking for me. the rest of the site got me started though and it is full of excellent information. this post will just focus on explaining how i was able to finally put the pieces together. i am posting this in case anyone else has the same trouble as i did and might benefit from another point of view.

background:
i have two routers because my high speed internet comes in though the phone into a router with no outlets other then one port (it is not a hub). i will have up to 7 devices that need to be connected on a wireless network at any given time, so i have the phone router plugged into a wireless (and wired) router (it has wireless as well as 4 wired ports).

the first step was to set my first router (the one that i connect to first as i go out on the net, not the second one that is actually connected to the phone line) to a static ip. i did this with that router's admin page.

you can find your router's admin page by doing a tracert (in windows, command prompt) to an address like this:

tracert www.google.com

this returns a list of ip addresses and locations that your computer is taking to get to google.com. the first address is the first of your routers, that is where i set my static ip.

it is important to note that this is an internal static ip only for the local network, so don't be afraid you are breaking any rules with your ISP, this is not an external static ip.

you can check portfoward.com for instructions on how to configure your brand of router to a static ip. i may have been lucky there, because when i switched from automatic to static, it filled in all the fields for me.

then, i opened the opened the port for azureus to my computer running azureus. again, portfoward.com does a great job covering this. make sure your computer is set to a static ip as well, otherwise the port you open won't work when/if your computer gets a new ip.

this next part is where i had been stuck (embarrassingly, for years). i figured out where my second router was (the second ip in that tracert list) a while back, and i knew i had to open that same port there as well but it didn't click until recently that i had to open that port to THE FIRST ROUTER, not to the computer (i know, duh!)

so i opened the admin for the second router, opened the port and pointed it to the static ip that i set for the first router and, tada! green happies!

i don't know if this will help anyone else, but i know that if i had found a post like this a couple years ago, it would have saved me a lot of time. i hope it helps someone else :)