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Recently, Comcast has stopped the seeding of torrents. (More details here)

Basically, what they’re doing is telling your computer it needs to close it’s TCP connection at a certain port (in this case, your torrent clients’ port) via the RST TCP reset command.

Since they’re using such basic methods to stop seeding, there’s a simple way to stop them from stopping you. Although I have no fix for the Windows operating system, in Linux, it’s a simple fix. Every modern Linux distribution has iptables, so all you have to do is set it up to block this RST command. This should also work in BSD systems, Mac OS X, or any system with iptables.

All you have to do is run the following command, with superuser privileges (sudo, fakeroot, a super user terminal, etc). The one thing you need to do, is change the word $port to whatever port your torrent client uses.

Run in your shell/terminal: iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport $port --tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP

Also, should you ever need to remove this, all we need to do is make that A (for Append) a D (for Delete). The resulting command would be:

Run in your shell/terminal: iptables -D INPUT -p tcp --dport $port --tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP

In addition, I believe that if you have a router running some variant of Linux (DD-WRT, Open-WRT, etc), this trick should work on that, since all we’re doing is dropping RST commands.. All you should need to do is ssh or telnet into your router and run the command with the appropriate port, however, I haven’t tested this, so do this with caution.

If you have Windows, well, you’re SOL for now. Although, I expect a solution will reveal itself in the coming months.

All thanks to Eddie from my favorite tracker.