I have two problems with transmission. These two are unrelated to each other, and I will describe them seperately as a result.

But let me give me some background information first. In my home, I have a Sitecom Wireless Router connected to the cable modem. An Asus WL500gp is connected by wire to the Sitecom (main) router, and is setup as an Access Point in my network. A 500 GB USB 2.0 drive is connected, and is set up by following Wengi's excellent guide on this forum. Aside from using the Asus as an extension of the main router for internet purposes, I use the Asus to download torrents from internet. An older version of Transmission is installed (0.7), because newer versions regularly give failed hash problems. The setup is functional, yet at the same time, I regularly encounter problems. Part of it is my own inexperience with the linux-ish environment, but at the same time there might be some bugs as well (this is in no way meant as an attack on Oleg, because I cannot begin to comprehend the work, the time and effort he's put into this whole thing, partly just to please us all).

(1) The first problem has to do with the startup of torrents. From time to time, and lately it's been the case alot, Transmission_watchdog will have started, and processed the queued torrents. But the torrents refuse to actually start downloading (0 connections with peers are being made). The torrents work when running them on my notebook (confirming there are actual peers). My initial reaction was this was a NAT problem, so I forwarded the relevant torrent port (as found in the transmission config) in my Sitecom router, to the IP-address of the WL500gp. But this hasn't changed a thing. Is there anything I'm overlooking in my setup? Since my Asus functions as an Access Point, there should be no need to open any ports, as port traffic should be handled by the main router. I have to say the problem seems worse after the router's been on for a while without any interruption (power down).

(2) The second problem is rather odd. There have been some torrents where Transmission initiates a download, and then almost instantly considers it as
'finished'! But when looking in the 'target' folder, no file is found (yet it is seen as a completed torrent). Upon deleting the log file in the 'target'
folder, and restarting the torrent by putting it in the source folder, the process repeats itself: it considers itself as done. I've had a few files as well,
where it said it was seeding (with no actual file to be seen anywhere). This suggests it may have been downloaded somewhere in the past, but not in the folder as specified in the Transmission config (and I don't see how that could be possible). Has anyone had similar problems?


I also have some general questions:

(3) Sometimes, after the internet connection is down (due to cable modem or main router issues), or if the power goes out, my Asus does not seem to auto-re-mount the USB harddrive upon powering up or rebooting. It is strange, because I configured my Asus according to Wengi's file, so the relevant 'mount' commands are added to the config. After manually mounting drive, everything is okay again. But still, this is a nuisance.

(4) I know due to chipset limitations the WL500gp can only managed USB data transfer speeds up to 2.5 MB/sec. In my case, I've only managed about 1300 kb/sec. What are some of alternatives we can have to transfer lots of data? I've tried ejecting the USB disk (Ext3), and then connecting it to Windows. I installed a Windows Ext2/Ext3 driver (found here), but no success: the drive will get unreponsive and nearly crash my Windows XP. I know the driver can function: I've tried on the same USB 2.0 harddrive, prior to setting it up under the WL500gp, and it worked fine then. My guess is the swap partition might be causing this (as it probably has unreadable data). Any idea how to solve this, or are there any other alternatives to copy Ext3 data quickly to a Windows environment?

I am sorry for so much text. But I don't want to give too little information.