Community.Acanac.com

In order to use Bitvise (or any other SSH Client), you need to request a free Online PC from Acanac so that you will be able to create an SSH connection. Contact support at https://www.acanac.com/contactus.php

The following guides are listed here:

Bitvise Tunnelier (SSH Client - full set up)
uTorrent (modifications to use the SSH Client)
Internet Explorer (modifications to use the SSH Client)
Firefox (modifications to use the SSH Client)
FileZilla (FTP client - full set up)
Add a Network Location shortcut for FTP sites in Vista
Set Up Your Acanac E-mail Account in Microsoft Outlook 2007 (IMAP)


Bitvise Tunnelier

Bitvise Tunnelier is a much easier program than Putty and provides more features. I would highly recommend this program if you are looking for an SSH Client in order to use the workaround for BitTorrent throttling.

Step 1 - Get the free program here: http://www.bitvise.com/download-area and install.

Step 2 - Start the program and enter the Host, Port, Username and Password. Make sure you check the box to Store encrypted password in profile. Also, make sure that your Username is in both Upper and Lower cases and that the Host is nx.acanac.net. You'll notice that the bottom pane contains your session log.



Step 3 - Change your options so that you automatically reconnect. Also, I would recommend that you uncheck the Open Terminal and Open SFTP boxes ... unless you think that you will be using either of these on a regular basis. You can always manually open the windows by clicking on the two icons that will appear on the bottom left pane once you log in (not currently shown in the image below).



Step 4 - Set up your SOCKS forwarding to Port 8080 (**By the way, you don't really have to use port 8080, so long as any programs you set up with a SOCKS proxy server is the same as this port that you use ... I believe that Acanac chose 8080 just to make the instructions simpler for all to follow ... and so I will do the same**). Basically, Acanac will forward all data to this port on Bitvise. From Acanac's perspective, this is the destination port. From Bitvise's perspective, this is your listening port. You may check the box for FTP-to-SFTP bridge. If in the future, Acanac supports SFTP and merges the Online PC and Online Storage, then this may be useful as you will then be able to use the SFTP window to transfer files to and from the FTP server.



Step 5 - Save your profile. If you have other SSH Servers that you connect to, you can create additional profiles for each of those as well.

You should now have everything you need to effectively use Bitvise Tunnelier to open up an SSH Tunnel through Acanac's server. If it does not work, then go back to Step 2 and follow each step again carefully. There is now no reason that it should not work, with the exception that Acanac's server temporarily goes down or you did not request the free Online PC.

If you ever have problems, you should copy the relevant portion of the log into your post. To do this, all you have to do is right-click on the log and select Copy. Open up Notepad, paste, and then look for the relevant logs and copy over into your post. Please refer to this example: http://community.acanac.com/acanac/view ... 8559#28559


uTorrent

If you have been using uTorrent before trying this workaround, you only need to change one setting. If your uTorrent is already running, click on Options-->Preferences-->Connection. Under Proxy Server, select Socks5, Proxy: 127.0.0.1 and Port: 8080, and finally, check the box to Use proxy server for peer-to-peer connections. Exit uTorrent and open it again for the settings to take effect.



Now you are all set with uTorrent as well. If this does not work, then review your SOCKS forwarding port in Step 4 and your Proxy server port in uTorrent. Both should be 8080.

While you are running uTorrent, you will see similar logs as this in Bitvise:

01:00:25.025 Accepted SOCKS5 connection from 127.0.0.1:50987 to 72.23.43.230:23229.
01:00:25.025 Accepted SOCKS5 connection from 127.0.0.1:50986 to 209.217.79.235:42536.
01:00:25.025 Accepted SOCKS5 connection from 127.0.0.1:50988 to 24.222.204.150:21082.

You might be asking yourself why the ports from your computer (50987, 50986, 50988, etc.), are being used. Isn't it supposed to be port 8080? Well, remember that I said port 8080 on your computer is the listening port. With torrents, you send multiple requests to multiple peers simultaneously. Each request is sent from a unique port from your computer. From above, you can see that a request was sent from port 50987 to an IP address of 72.23.43.230 on their port 23229. The peer sends back data through a random port as well, but to Acanac's server first and Acanac then forwards the data back to you on port 8080. The log only shows the connections that you have initiated to the peer and when that initial connection has closed, and not the actual data that continues to being transferred once that connection has been made.

Note: if you are using the SSH Tunnel for torrents, you will no longer be connectable (ie. your port forwarding will not work), regardless of what the BitTorrent client you are using is indicating. This is because all connections between you and other peers are going through the tunnel. And if an unsolicited request is sent to Acanac's server, it will not be forwarded to you. All this means is that you will not be able to connect to others that are similarly unconnectable.

If you are on public trackers, then this may reduce your overall speed as you may have less peers to connect to. With private trackers, you should generally be unaffected as members on private trackers will stay on to seed the torrent in order to maintain their upload ratio.

With private trackers, you need to be aware that they monitor your IP address ... this is how they can track your upload ratio. When you use the workaround, you are using a proxy server and the IP address that will be monitored is Acanac's IP address. Because of this, you need to log in to your private tracker through Acanac as well. One option is to use the Online PC, but this is tedious and you may not like the browser that comes with the Online PC.

Another option which I would recommend is for you to use a browser ... one that is not the regular browser that you would primarily use to surf the internet. For instance, if you use Firefox regularly, then set up Internet Explorer for this purpose. And vice versa, if you use Internet Explorer, then download an alternative browser like Firefox.

Of course, you can just set this up on your regular browser and not even use a second browser ... but that means whenever you surf the web, you always have to connect to the SSH Tunnel and that unnecessarily adds to Acanac's bandwidth as you would be tunneling everything through their server.

Edit: June 8, 2008 - Some private trackers use passkeys, which eliminate the use of IP addresses. So if you are a member of a private tracker that uses passkeys, you do not need to worry about logging in through Acanac. You can read more in the June 8 post below.

Edit: June 23, 2008 - With more testing, it has now been determined that with public trackers (and possibly with private trackers that use passkeys), you are connectable (albeit limited), even with the proxy server being used. But it is not through the proxy server that makes you connectable. You can read more here.


Internet Explorer

Alternate Browser 1 - Using Internet Explorer to visit your private trackers. Click on Tools, Internet Options, Connections, LAN Settings, then check the boxes for Use a proxy server for your LAN and Bypass proxy server for local addresses, then click on Advanced and select Socks: 127.0.0.1 and Port: 8080.

Also, please note that you should add your modem/router IP addresses to the Exceptions list. Otherwise, you will not be able to access it. To access my own modem, I use 192.168.1.1 ... but you should be adding the IP addresses that are specific to you.




Firefox

Alternate Browser 2- Using Firefox to visit your private trackers. Click on Tools, Options, Advanced, Network, Settings, then click on Manual proxy configuration select SOCKS Host: 127.0.0.1 and Port: 8080 and click on SOCKSv5.

Also, please note that you should add your modem/router IP addresses to the No Proxy For list. Otherwise, you will not be able to access it. To access my own modem, I use 192.168.1.1 ... but you should be adding the IP addresses that are specific to you.



Good luck and happy downloading! A guide for FileZilla is coming soon.

Excellent work Soulcrusher, thank you.

_________________

Remember, Don't over Quote .

FileZilla

As promised, here is a tutorial to set up FileZilla to open an FTP connection to both your Online PC and your 100GB Online Storage, and more importantly, how to set up a secure connection.


SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) to Online PC

Since the Online PC is on the SSH Server, you can use an SFTP connection here. And since you will be logging in with the same username and password as the SSH Client (eg. Bitvise), you won't even need to start the SSH Client. Bear in mind that if you use other programs that require an SSH connection (ie. uTorrent, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.), then you will still be required to start up the SSH Client.

Step 1 - Get the free program here: http://filezilla-project.org/download.php and install.

Step 2 - Start the program. In the upper left corner, you will see an icon which will open the Site Manager. Alternatively, you can select File-->Site Manager or you can just type <Ctrl-S>.



Step 3 - Click on New Site and name your connection (I used Acanac - Online PC). Enter the Host, Username and Password. Port is 22, but you don't need to enter it as this is the default port. And even if you enter it, the next time you open up the Site Manager, it will be blank anyway. For the Servertype, select SFTP - SSH File Transfer Protocol (Note: older versions of FileZilla will be SFTP using SSH2). Make sure that your Username is in both Upper and Lower cases and that the Host is nx.acanac.net. Click on Connect and on the new window that pops up, check the box to save the key and you are finished.





FTPES (FTP over explicit TLS) to 100GB Online Storage

Since the Online Storage is on another server, you will need to set up an FTPES connection here (more commonly known as FTPS ... but since Acanac only supports FTPS with explicit encryption ... hence the E in FTPES).

Step 1 - Get the free program here: http://filezilla-project.org/download.php and install.

Step 2 - Start the program. In the upper left corner, you will see an icon which will open the Site Manager. Alternatively, you can select File-->Site Manager or you can just type <Ctrl-S>.



Step 3 - Click on New Site and name your connection (I used Acanac - Online Storage). Enter the Host, Username and Password. Port is 21, but you don't need to enter it as this is the default port. And even if you enter it, the next time you open up the Site Manager, it will be blank anyway. For the Servertype, select FTPES - FTP over explicit TLS/SSL (Note: older versions of FileZilla will be FTP over TLS (explicit encryption). Make sure that your Username is in Lower cases only and that the Host is ftpserver.acanac.com. Click on Connect and on the new window that pops up, check the box to always trust the certificate and you are finished.





You can keep adding additional FTP sites using Step 3 above. Always test out whether or not those sites can accept the secure FTP protocols. If none of them work, only then should you choose the normal FTP - File Transfer Protocol.

Now, there is one last thing that you can do with FileZilla if you only plan to visit an FTP site only once. That is using the Quickconnect option.

In the example below, I am just connecting to the 100 GB Online Storage. Under Host, enter the ftp server ... if it supports encryption, then prepend the host with the protocol identifier. In my example, it would be
Enter your Username and Password and click on Quickconnect.

Soulcrusher you should really change your username to TutorialMaster. LOL
Thanks again.

_________________

Remember, Don't over Quote .

WOW! That's very complete! I didn't notice any errors.


I'm setting up FireFox as we speak.



Thanks,
Taylor

Great guide. How sure about this statement: "With private trackers, you need to be aware that they monitor your IP address." ?

Most people do not have static IPs and stay logged in through cookies on many trackers, so I don't think this is how it works.

If you look at the tracker link within the torrent you download from a private tracker, it has something like the following format (at least mine do):
http://www.privatetracker1.com:port/ann ... xxxxxxxxxx
http://www.privatetracker2.com:port/xxx ... x/announce

And I believe that your account information and updating is done through this passkey, or whatever weird string of characters you have included in your private tracker torrent.

Does someone have a confirmation on this?

Hi pats0,

You are right ... cookies allow you to stay logged in on private trackers. But that only allows you to continue to browse through their website and download their .torrent files.

And you are also right about private trackers using passkeys. Passkeys allow trackers to verify if you are registered with them, regardless of the IP address you are downloading from. This is very beneficial for people who do not have static IP addresses. Here's some additional information:

http://www.torrentleech.org/faq.php#67

However, not all private trackers use passkeys. The private trackers that I am registered to do not use passkeys. They still track you by the IP addresses that you have previously logged in with ... and since my IP address is dynamic, I need to log in every time I restart my modem and get a new IP address. Otherwise, when I start uTorrent, my private tracker doesn't recognize the new IP address. The following image shows me when I am not using the proxy server:



If I had a static IP address, then I would not have this problem. On the otherhand, by using Acanac's IP address, I do not have to always log in to the private tracker through the Online PC or through my current method of the proxy server in Internet Explorer. However, if Acanac does change it's IP address every once in a while, then I would have to log in again through the above method.

As most people do not understand this, then if Acanac's IP address does change, their private torrents will no longer work and if they log in through a web browser that does not route through the proxy server/Online PC, then the torrents will still not work when they are using the workaround method.

As a result, I thought it would be easier to provide a simpler solution which would always work, rather than to possibly provide too much information and confuse people. And if you always log in to your private trackers with a web browser that uses the proxy server before starting uTorrent, then you will never encounter this problem.

Anyhow, I hope this clears things up for you.

And thanks to jhbell50, who discovered that you will need to add your modem/router IP address to the exception list when setting up the proxy server in your web browser if you want to use this same browser to access the modem/router.

viewtopic.php?p=29436#29436

If you use two separate browsers ... one for surfing the web and accessing your modem/router and the other for visiting private trackers, then you don't need to change anything, although it won't hurt to add this in. However, if you only use one browser and it is set up to use the proxy server, then you will need to do this.

The instructions have now been added above if you want to review it.

Ah, that clears it up. I have another question that you may be able to answer me. If there are multiple users using the same router, will this process works for all of the computers? Or do you need to change the 8080 port to something unique for each user?

Also, is there any way that the router can make the SSH connection so that each individual computer does not have to?

This should work on every computer. Since I currently do not use a router, I can't answer on whether or not you can get the router to make an SSH connection. Fergless might be able to answer this, as he has a network configured already.

However, within a couple of weeks, I will be setting up a wireless network here ... at that time I will be able to test it out if you don't get an answer by then.

I'm behind router (2700), NAT'ed and didn't have to open any additional ports, and Vista firewall is on. Everything is workig perfectly.

Thank you soulcrusher excellent guide

You're welcome. I'm happy to help out others. I don't have as much technical experience as others here ... but when something interests me, such as the SSH workaround, I try to learn as much as I can and find the easiest way of utilizing it.

By the way, if anyone has any requests, please post it. And others are welcome to post similar guides here as well. I will update the home page and provide links to the new guides.

Don't be shy!

Ehmm, great how-to, but I am stuck on the login\pass stage with Tunellier. What login credentials should I use here? The one, which are provided by Acanac within DSL modem? It doesn't work here... Or should I create new user\pass somewhere?

Thanks in advance!

Did you request the online PC?