Why Would Bt Relay Download Your Share?

[stanha]

Today I saw a node named STATION, which turned out to be relay-02.utorrent.com downloading one of my shares.

Interestingly enough on port 3000.

67.215.231.242:3000

It downloaded a few hundred megs and quite a few files.

Here is its whois record:

IP Location: United States United States Santa Ana Secured Private Network

ASN: United States AS29761 AS-QUADRANET - QuadraNet, Inc,US (registered May 01, 2003)

Resolve Host: relay-02.utorrent.com

IP Address: 67.215.231.242

Why would it do that?

Does not it mean that they have explicitly created a share and named their node as

one of participants and not just as a relay? For what purpose?

[Firon]

The relay is used when you have two nodes that can't talk to each other directly (even with STUN and other forms of hole punching). It's to ensure your devices can still sync.

You can disable it, but your devices will no longer be able to sync until you resolve the connection issue.

[stanha]

The relay is used when you have two nodes that can't talk to each other directly (even with STUN and other forms of hole punching). It's to ensure your devices can still sync.

You can disable it, but your devices will no longer be able to sync until you resolve the connection issue.

This does not make sense to me.

From what I am seeing, it is not a relay behavior.

First of all, I have never seen such behavior before, and I should have, according to your interpretation.

Secondly, what I see is a plain node account - "STATION".

This means to me they are coming as ordinary node and not as relay.

What I am seeing is a relay actually doing a regular file download and not merely relaying something. At that time there was no other node that was downloading. So, why was relay downloading, just like any other node?

To me, this behavior is EXACTLY the behavior of an ordinary node and my question is why does it happen this way and why did not I see the same exact behavior before and how come I do not recollect ever seeing the node "STATION"?

The description of behavior of relays which I have does not include this case.

Can you refer me to documentation which describes the behavior I am seeing?

[GreatMarko]

"STATION" will simply be the name of another user's device running Sync that is connecting to your device, as Firon indicates, via a relayed connection.

 

Because their connection is "relayed", the inbound connection to your Sync will appear to originate from "relay-02.utorrent.com", rather than from the end-user's actual domain/IP.

 

Given you've published Secrets on the web, it's perhaps to be expected that unknown Sync devices will show up in your Sync's "Devices" tab, as once you publish a secret online, you then have no control (short of changing the secret) over which other devices connect to and sync with your own device.