BitcoinTalk

Setting up multiple bitcoin machines behind NAT

29
Satoshi-only
BitcoinTalk
#2
From:
satoshi
Subject:
Re: Setting up multiple bitcoin machines behind NAT
Date:
Right now there isn't a port number setting to do that.  It's a feature yet to be implemented.  You can only set up your NAT to port-forward to one of the computers.  (I said something earlier about NAT port translation, but that wouldn't work, other nodes wouldn't know to connect to that port)

If you want, as a small optimization, you could run the rest of your computers as:
bitcoin -connect=<the IP of the first computer>

so they get all their network communication from the first computer and don't all connect over the net individually for the same information.  This saves bandwidth, although it doesn't use much bandwidth to begin with, so it wouldn't really matter unless you had tons of computers.

For redundancy in case the first computer goes down, you could have two that connect out and the rest connect to both of them.  The first two are run normally, the rest are run like:
bitcoin -connect=<IP1> -connect=<IP2>
BitcoinTalk
#4
From:
satoshi
Subject:
Re: Setting up multiple bitcoin machines behind NAT
Date:
At the moment, it always assumes the incoming port is 8333, so it would tell other bitcoin nodes to connect to router:8333 even if you're redirecting from another port number.

I'm not in a big hurry to fix this because I can't think of any benefit to having more than one incoming connection port.  If you're providing one incoming port, then you've done your bit to help the network.  Having two incoming ports to the same person doesn't help redundancy.

If you have many computers, then using the -connect switch on most of them to connect locally makes more sense.