Problem

Presentation

Recently, I tried out some networking shenanigans. I was attempting to isolate the route across a commercial VPN with a SOCKS5 server. Programs elsewhere on the LAN would be configured to pass through that proxy when I desired to move traffic out the VPN. qBittorrent (5.1.2) was one such program, marked to proxy announces and peer connections. Unfortunately, this use of a SOCKS5 proxy in qB presented an issue with announces to a certain tracker. Announces were rejected, and I received a message reported back of ‘port 1 is blacklisted.’

Explanation

The problem boils down to the listening port being unset when a proxy is configured and ‘use proxy for peer connections’ is enabled. This effectively disables inbound peer connections, and makes that fact known to trackers through your announces.

Tracker operators can choose to blacklist clients which say they listen on certain ports. For at least one piece of tracker software, this is interpreted as port 1. Presumably the tracker in question for me blacklists the entire privileged port range.

This behavior was implemented in qB with the understanding that one cannot accept unsolicited incoming connections through a SOCKS proxy by design. To be connectable when making use of the proxy feature for peer connections, one would have to consider additional networking intervention such as a reverse TCP proxy to route inbound traffic from the proxy server back to the client machine.

This is obviously out of the scope of the BitTorrent client, and it was presumed that broadcasting that the client is unconnectable to trackers would be better for swarm health considering the very reasonable assumption that the majority of proxy users wouldn’t go to the lengths required to be otherwise.

That said, this frankly opinionated behavior isn’t uniformly applied in qB; when the client knows your unconnectable from other means, it doesn’t unset the listening port. I’d call this an inconsistent and unintuitive implementation detail.

Solution

Initial attempt

I attempted to follow this blog post ᵃ to resolve this issue, rebuilding libtorrent 2.0.11 with a custom patch to source code. It compiled successfully, yet restarting the program yielded a failure to announce to any trackers.

After talking with a friend and Claude about it, we’re thinking the patch is too aggressive and likely results in libtorrent making direct connections through the primary physical interface, enp8s0 in my case, which fail due to VPN client routing rules (I haven’t removed the workstation VPN client yet, wanting to wait and insure everything is behaving as expected.)

What worked

Digging around further, I found a pending PR to libtorrent which aims to properly fix the issue. Discussing further with my friend, we decided that modifying qB to hardcode the flag this PR implements seemed like the best move forward in lieu of waiting for both projects to incorporate the changes.

This was a fairly straightforward task, being an Arch user. Their package management system makes it trivially easy to modify core packages for custom compilation jobs, but I didn’t even have to go that far. Since core packages use release binaries, and I needed to modify source code, I checked AUR for -git versions, and these were readily available.

Implementation

An important note

The tracker in question that I wanted to get this working for explicitly forbids running development builds of approved BitTorrent clients. My solution re-compiles qB against the 5.1.x release branch while adding experimental code. This is technically spoofing, as we have modified the source code and diverged from that of the official release.

If you’re running into this same issue, and the site that’s cucking you has a similar rule, consider whether it’s worth risking your account before following this guide. The PR to libtorrent which fixes this problem is in review, and very well could be merged soon. The changes to accommodate this new feature are trivial to implement in BitTorrent clients relying on that library. You might not have to wait long before the fix becomes merely upgrading your client and changing a setting!

After going through all this work, I decided not to move forward with the application changes, as I was not comfortable with risking my private tracker accounts. Regardless, I publish this information for those who would find some benefit.

Set up the build environment

These commands just download the latest AUR package snapshots. The PKGBUILD files may have been updated since writing of this post, so do bear that in mind.

wget https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/libtorrent-rasterbar-2_0-git.tar.gz
tar xzf libtorrent-rasterbar-2_0-git.tar.gz

wget https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/qbittorrent-git.tar.gz
tar xzf qbittorrent-git.tar.gz

Patch libtorrent build file

libtorrent-rasterbar-2_0-git/PKGBUILD

Main change here is to the source directive, moving from the official repo to the fork by the user whom submitted the PR we’re interested in (Masong19hippow/libtorrent on the ListenonTCPWithProxy branch)

3,4c3,4
< pkgname=libtorrent-rasterbar-2_0-git
< pkgver=2.0.11.r45.g98e02bf5d
---
> pkgname=libtorrent-rasterbar-git
> pkgver=r13898.d235307ba
6c6
< pkgdesc="A feature complete C++ bittorrent library (git branch RC_2_0)"
---
> pkgdesc="A feature complete C++ bittorrent library (git PR #8003)"
14c14
< source=('git+https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent.git#branch=RC_2_0')
---
> source=('git+https://github.com/Masong19hippows/libtorrent.git#branch=ListenOnTCPWithProxy')
27,30c27
<   _tag=$(git tag -l --sort -v:refname | grep -E '^v2\.0\.[0-9\.]+$' | head -n1)
<   _rev=$(git rev-list --count $_tag..HEAD)
<   _hash=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)
<   printf "%s.r%s.g%s" "$_tag" "$_rev" "$_hash" | sed 's/^v//'
---
>   printf "r%s.%s" "$(git rev-list --count HEAD)" "$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)"

Create custom patchfile

qbittorrent-git/src/libtorrent-v5_1_x-PR8003.patch

This is the patch that creates and sets the new hardcoded option to qB that was added by the libtorrent PR.

diff --git a/src/base/bittorrent/sessionimpl.cpp b/src/base/bittorrent/sessionimpl.cpp
index da1419f49..eebdb852b 100644
--- a/src/base/bittorrent/sessionimpl.cpp
+++ b/src/base/bittorrent/sessionimpl.cpp
@@ -1900,6 +1900,7 @@ lt::settings_pack SessionImpl::loadLTSettings() const

settingsPack.set_bool(lt::settings_pack::proxy_peer_connections, isProxyPeerConnectionsEnabled());
settingsPack.set_bool(lt::settings_pack::proxy_hostnames, proxyConfig.hostnameLookupEnabled);
+        settingsPack.set_bool(lt::settings_pack::proxy_accept_incoming, true);
}

settingsPack.set_bool(lt::settings_pack::announce_to_all_trackers, announceToAllTrackers());

Patch qbittorrent build file

qbittorrent-git/PKGBUILD

Similarly, we change the source directive here, but only to move from main to the release branch, v5_1_x. We also add the prepare() block to patch in the aforementioned file.

9c9
< pkgver=5.1.0alpha1.r306.gb462a2bf0
---
> pkgver=5.1.2.r13220.202ff8a09
29c29
< source=("$pkgbase::git+https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent.git")
---
> source=("$pkgbase::git+https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent.git#branch=v5_1_x")
35,41c35,37
<   # replace latest tag with version from cmake
<   local _major=`grep -m 1 QBT_VERSION_MAJOR src/base/version.h.in | cut -d' ' -f3`
<   local _minor=`grep -m 1 QBT_VERSION_MINOR src/base/version.h.in | cut -d' ' -f3`
<   local _bugfix=`grep -m 1 QBT_VERSION_BUGFIX src/base/version.h.in | cut -d' ' -f3`
<   local _build=`grep -m 1 QBT_VERSION_BUILD src/base/version.h.in | cut -d' ' -f3`
<   local _status=`grep -m 1 QBT_VERSION_STATUS src/base/version.h.in | cut -d' ' -f3 | sed 's/"//g'`
<   local _cmake_ver=`printf "${_major}.${_minor}.${_bugfix}"`
---
>   local _git_ver=$(git describe --long --tags | sed -E 's/^release-//;s/-[0-9]+//;s/-g[0-9a-f]{9}//;s/-/./g')
>   printf "%s.r%s.%s" "${_git_ver}" "$(git rev-list --count HEAD)" "$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)"
> }
43,50c39,40
<   [[ "${_build}" -ne 0 ]] && _cmake_ver=`printf "${_cmake_ver}.${_build}"`
<   [[ -n "${_status}" ]] && _cmake_ver=`printf "${_cmake_ver}${_status}"`
<
<   # cutting off 'release-' prefix that presents in the git tag
<   local _git_ver=`git describe --long --tags | sed 's/^release-//;s/\([^-]*-g\)/r\1/;s/-/./g'`
<   local _git_tag=`git describe --tags --abbrev=0 | sed 's/^release-//;s/\([^-]*-g\)/r\1/;s/-/./g'`
<
<   printf "${_git_ver/$_git_tag/$_cmake_ver}"
---
> prepare() {
>   patch -d "${pkgname}" -Np1 -i "${srcdir}/libtorrent-v5_1_x-PR8003.patch"

The rest of the changes in these PKGBUILD diffs are to update the package name and version metadata. It’s not essential, but I wanted to try to conform to AUR standards despite not publishing these. Sortof gave up halfway, through. 😋

Build, install, test

# Uninstall core packages
pacman -R < pacman -Qsq libtorrent

# Build and install libtorrent
cd libtorrent-rasterbar-2_0-git
makepkg -cs
pacman -U --asdep libtorrent-rasterbar-git-r13898.d235307ba-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

# Build and install qbittorrent
cd ../qbittorrent-git
makepkg -cs
pacman -U qbittorrent-git-1:5.1.2.r13220.202ff8a09-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

Restart qB, and we’re good to go. Valid announces ought to now be sent to the tracker in question, with it reporting back a state of ‘Working!’

I tested this with a fresh qB configuration and an infohash pointed at local tracker software to be able to confirm that the tracker indeed receives an announce including a valid listening port.

Finishing touches

System reconfiguration

To prevent future system upgrades from touching our custom packages, we need to inform pacman of that desire. Modify /etc/pacman.conf and add a line under [options] declaring IgnorePkg = libtorrent-rasterbar-git qbittorrent-git. Remember to check qB’s release notes periodically! Once we can move back to a mainline release, reinstall qbittorrent from core, and remove that line from the pacman configuration. There’ll be a new checkbox under the proxy settings to enable the listening port at that point.

qBittorrent reconfiguration

The last set of changes you might consider making lie in the ‘Advanced’ tab of the ‘Preferences’ modal:

• Set ‘Network Interface’ to the system’s primary physical adapter
• Set ‘IP address to bind to’ appropriately, depending on how your SOCKS server is configured (the IPv4 address if IPv4 only, or ‘Any’ if dual-stack.) These settings work together to a) to only listen on that interface and IP(s) for incoming peer connections, and b) inform the proxy code path to only initiate outbound connections through the same route (qB issue #11735.)

This isn’t necessary to prevent leaks, since connections to the proxy server through other interfaces merely won’t be able to route to the intended destination. Regardless, this is proper/tidy networking to want to enforce upon the client.

Confirm that these settings are achieving the expected result by checking the Execution Log. You shouldn’t see messages like SOCKS5 proxy error. Address: (LAN IP):(Listening port). that are unexpected. Link-local addresses are expected to generate errors, as traffic across them isn’t routable. However, if you see timed out on a routable LAN IP, this indicates the proxy server isn’t responding.

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