I noticed that there is a problem when I do an eMule server search.
With the router I get 30-50 results, but without the router(direct connection) I get 800+ results.
KAD search works fine tough. Ports are forwarded properly as far as I know. eMule shows everything green.
eMule uses the UDP port for searching.
The router is set to NAT.


What could be the cause of this behaviour?

No ideas?

did you enable and configure UPnP on your device?

No, I did not configure uPnP. I've just forwarded the ports manually. The emule application shows that the ports are forwarded correctly.

Enable UPnP!
In router AND workstation/torrentbox.

Why?

It should work fine without uPnP.

What is the reason of stating a question if the answer is not neccessary?

I don't want uPnP. uPnP isn't safe. It should work without uPnP.

normis, what do you think?

It should work but it looks like it doesn't. Just for experiment sake, enable it and see if it makes a difference. Maybe you forwarded the wrong ports, emule could be wrong about connectivity (green lights or something like that).

You must first try all options to find the problem, then work on solving it properly.

eMule works fine(it downloads, it uploads,etc) except for the global server search which returns 30-50 results instead of 800+(without the router).

Here are the pictures. Are the ports forwarded correctly? IMHO, they are.

And the last picture: I'm guessing that the search returns lots of UDP packets in a short period and the router drops most of them.

I want to solve this problem.

I'm guessing that the search returns lots of UDP packets in a short period and the router drops most of them.

Router doesn't drop anything just for fun. But it could do it, if you had some other firewall rules that could influence it, e.g. some attempts to secure the network. Do you have anything like that? Or is it just two rules for eMule and one for NAT?

In NAT I have some forwardings for various ports, and in Filter rules I have 2 rules to isolate the PCs that are behind the router. I've NAT-ed them with their own network.
Any Ideas what could cause this behaviour since I haven't used filters?

disable all those rules and try then

I did, but I still get few results.

I tried eMule on:

- PC with public address
- PC behind NAT with forwarded ports
- PC behind NAT without forwarded ports

And the number of results is always almost the same (difference around 1%, but it's normal, other clients with matching files connect and disconnect to/from server all the time). Looking at the packet flow, it's no surprise, because the search query is sent over already established TCP connection to server and the results go back over the same connection. I found some documentation of eMule protocol and it says that UDP searches are also possible (they call it Enhanced file search), but it does not say when it's used. My eMule doesn't seem to use it at all.
So it sounds to me that the problem might be something else than router. E.g. are you always connected to the same server?

Hi, Sob.

Yes I'm always connected to the same server, eDonkeyServer No2.

If I had this problem myself, I'd try to test with different computer and/or clean install of eMule. Good for guaranteed clean installs are virtual machines. You could also try NAT other than ROS, to see if it makes any difference. If you don't have another router to test with, it can be easily done using VM, just connect PC directly and then connect VM running on it to VM integrated NAT connection. Other than that, you could sniff packets, looking for some clues there, but I'd save it for case when everything else fails.

use a better server to connect ... .and use a better emule addon
try the extreme emule