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You might be confusing public IP addresses with ports? If your torrent client doesn’t have a public IP address that just means it’s offline / no internet. Maybe your internet is down or the VPN is disconnected. You’re won’t torrent anything at all in that state.
One side of the connection needs a
public addressopen port, not both. When both parties don’t have apublicly addressable IPopen port,the status is firewalled. I guessthey can “see” each other but are unable to exchange any torrent data.
For what it’s worth in the situation where both peers don’t have open ports (meaning they are both firewalled) they end up having to wait for another peer to join that torrent swarm that happens to have a open port, that’s the only way any data will exchange in that swarm. Until that happens those two peers will sit there waiting and not exchanging data.
Should be fine, just don’t cheap out on the external drive / cable you will be using. And when you’re using something like smartctl you’ll know right away if SMART info is passing through your USB for proper testing.
I’ve done a lot of these type of scans via USB drives, honestly the more annoying part is that some USB drives do wonky things like go into sleep mode within 1-5 minutes which will disrupt any sort of scanning you had going. So with USB drive scanning I usually implement something to keep the drive alive and awake e.g. a simple infinite loop script to write a file every x seconds, or if you’re on windows you can also use KeepAliveHD.