I am having trouble opening a port to allow uploads from qbit. I have port 6881 set in qbit and have put the following in my .env per AiTom FIREWALLINPUTPORTS=8080,8191,6767,6881 but no love. Restarting media does not pick up the .env changes, and the port is not being opened by gluten.
8 replies
tomspark wrote:
Ah, you've hit a real rough edge — not your fault. The setting you added (FIREWALLINPUTPORTS) is currently fixed inside SparkBox's config and isn't read from your .env, so adding 6881 there did nothing — that's the "not being picked up" you saw. (Heads up too: .env changes only take effect on sudo sparkbox up, never restart, which reuses the old settings.) The bigger catch: accepting incoming seed connections through a VPN only works if your VPN plan supports port forwarding. A lot of consumer VPNs (Surfshark included) don't offer it — in which case your downloads and outbound uploads still work fine, but no port setting will let outside peers connect in. Which VPN/server are you on? That decides whether this is achievable at all — and I'm flagging the config mismatch to get fixed properly either way.
AvantMagus wrote:
I am using SurfShark but also have a NordVPN acct if that would be better
tomspark wrote:
Honestly, you can stop chasing this one — neither Surfshark nor Nord offers port forwarding (Nord dropped it years ago), so switching wouldn't help. And the good news is you don't need it: without a forwarded port your downloads work normally and you still upload to any peer you connect to — you just won't accept brand-new incoming connections. For almost every setup that's completely fine and you'll still seed. So no config change needed on your end. (If you ever wanted to fully max out incoming connections you'd need a VPN that specifically supports port forwarding, but it's genuinely not necessary for normal use.)
tomspark wrote:
Surfshark doesn't do port forwarding at all — NordVPN's a bit better but their implementation is finicky with gluetun and requires extra config steps. Honestly, if incoming ports matter to you, Mullvad or a seedbox are the real answers here, but for casual torrenting you're fine without it (outbound uploads still work, just fewer peers can initiate to you).
AvantMagus wrote:
That’s what I thought but I show 0 uploads. Everything I have downloaded is just sitting n the queue.
tomspark wrote:
Ah, that's a different gremlin than the port stuff — and it's fixable. "0 uploads, everything sitting in the queue" usually means qBittorrent has those finished torrents parked (queued) instead of actively seeding. Quick fix: open qBittorrent, select all your torrents (Ctrl+A), right-click → Force Resume. That pulls them out of the queue and tells qBit to seed regardless of limits. Give it a few minutes and watch the Status column. If they then show "Seeding" but still 0 up, that just means nobody's currently pulling those particular files (normal for less-popular torrents) — nothing's broken. If they're stuck on "Stalled," tell me and we'll look at the connection side.
AvantMagus wrote:
That's it. Thank you sir
tomspark wrote:
That's the one — glad it's seeding now! 🎉 Thanks for sticking with it through the whole chase. Happy seeding.