Qortal Project

We need as many people as possible to be sure they have port forwarding setup on as many of their nodes as possible! This will ensure the network growth doesn't hit a point where there aren't enough peers allowing incoming connections.

We expect there to be significant growth over the next 6-12 months, so we need everyone to be aware of this, and to help us as much as possible with port forwarding and sharing the newly port forwarded internet IP and port connections with the rest of the network by adding a peer with that information.

Port Forwarding: a router setting to allow INCOMING connections to your Qortal Node. This greatly benefits the entire network, by having more overall nodes that can be connected IN to. By default most routers only allow OUTBOUND connections, therefore if you do NOT specifically allow incoming connections on a specific port, you can only connect OUT to computers on the Internet.

Recently, we have made a change in the Qortal Core, that will allow the use of what's called uPnP or (Universal Plug and Play). What this means, is that if uPnP is enabled on your router (which by default most home routers have it enabled) it will allow the Qortal Core to automatically attempt to Port Forward the Qortal P2P port (12392 by default) into your node.

Now, uPnP only works for the FIRST node on a network, and only if that is enabled on your router. If you do NOT have uPnP, or you have MULTIPLE NODES ON YOUR NETWORK, you will need to individually port forward each node, with a different external port. For example, let's say you have 3 nodes on your home network. They are on LAN IP addresses 192.168.1.100, through 192.168.1.103. In your port forwarding (or NAT) settings in the router, you would need to do the following:

Node 1 Internal: 12392 External: 12392

Node 2 Internal: 12392 External: 22392

Node 3 Internal: 12392 External: 32392

This would allow 3 separate incoming connections on the same outside internet IP address, to connect to each Qortal node. Here’s something that most people may not know: by default, Qortal will check for port 12392, so if you have the default port open, the network will know and attempt to connect to your node. However, if your node is on a DIFFERENT port, from multiple port forwards on the same LAN.

For example, with port 22392, Qortal will NOT by default know this UNLESS you ADD PEER from another node AND add the peer with your external internet IP (which you can find easily by going to https://canhazip.com or doing ```curl https://canhazip.com``` from terminal).

Let’s say your home's external IP is 1.2.3.4 and you have 3 nodes on my your LAN on 192.x.x.x with correct port forwarding and ports 12392, 22392, and 32392. You would then go to another node and ADD PEER and add 1.2.3.4:22392 and 1.2.3.4:32392 in your node, which will then broadcast to the rest of the Qortal network that there is an available peer that can be connected to on those ports. Then the rest of the network will be aware of it automatically, and you'll get full peers on your nodes.

Go to the Port Forwarding page under the How-To Guides for more information.