[Gslug-general] Please help me setup a torrent server

[debianuser]

One other issue I will be trying to figure out is linking my torrent files to web URL's. I will mostly be mirroring content that I will also be hosting on the web. This makes it easy for people to get the whole torrent if nobody is seeding that particular one. (Which won't be the case if I can seed 700 torrents. Having both a torrent seeder and a web seeder will help with transfer speeds I would imagine.)

Most of my torrents will consist of one video file and one or two text files that describe the video, etc. So I will want to be able to link the URL's for at least the video into the torrent somehow.

KTorrent and bittorrent for windows both provide a mechanism to link at least one URL.

Actually, there is one other thing that I was wanting to try. I was thinking about using the old shell machine as a slave torrent server. I could take care of setting up the torrents and everything using KTorrent or bittorrent for windows and then have some sort of interface where the shell machine would download the torrent and associated data from my other computer. Since it would be connected on my local network, it would download the content quite fast. I could let the slave server keep seeding the file after that.

I noticed that Democracy Now! uses an xml file to let torrent clients such as Miro get new content.

http://ewheel.democracynow.org/rss.xml

I am interested in doing this also. I hand coded a script that generates an xml file similar to that, so I suppose that I will be able to do that for this purpose as well.

Actually, this is one of the reasons that I chose to make my content available via bittorrent, so that downloaders such as miro can share in the uploading to other clients. Plus, Miro and other clients like it, are specifically oriented to deal with the types of content that I will be offering.




See annotations of your message...

--- On Fri, 5/8/09, RijilV <rijilv at riji.lv> wrote:

> From: RijilV <rijilv at riji.lv>
> Subject: Re: [Gslug-general] Please help me setup a torrent server
> To: gslug-general at gslug.org
> Date: Friday, May 8, 2009, 8:04 AM
> 2009/5/8 debianuser <linux1 at anonymousmail.net>:
>
> Dude, seriously go easy with the sigs.  There's like 4x
> more
> signatures than content; I'm glad you have a political
> opinion but
> figure out a way to tell me about it in 4lines or _less_
> (72 chars
> wide..).

I'll fix that.


> As for what you want to do, so... if you're using TPB
> as your tracker
> then you don't need to worry about setting up a
> tracker, all you need
> to do is find a good client.  I strongly recommend
> rtorrent, I'm
> currently using it to seed ~700 torrents right now, works
> like a
> champ.

I took a brief look at the rtorrent entry in Wikipedia. Looks interesting. A text based, ncurses client sounds pretty cool! That is pretty much what I am seeking.

700 torrents... sounds like it will allow me to do what I want to do.


> There are innumberal docs out there specifically targeted
> at debian
> users for setting up rtorrent, many times including how to
> setup the
> web front end wtorrent as well.  I don't have any
> preference of which
> guide to choose so you might let google make that choice
> for you.

Awesome. I'll defiantly be checking into those.

Since I will be running the torrent server on a old shell-only machine, having a web interface that I can use to control the torrent server would be incredibly cool!!! That sounds like something that utorrent has. I tried out the utorrent web interface and it seemed to be pretty cool, however, that seems to only be ported to windows. (I think anyways.)


> There are a couple of things you should be aware of,
> firstly is you
> really should be "connectable", that is whatever
> port your torrent
> client is listening on should be directly accessable from
> users of the
> Internet.  That might mean you have to forward ports
> through your
> firewall to your machine that is doing the torrenting
> behind it.  If
> you have any questions about that feel free to ask, just
> provide
> details as to how your network is setup.

No problems there. I have been using bittorrent for windows and KTorrent for linux in the past with no issues.


> Secondly, you mention how you've tried before and
> can't get things to
> 'upload files' .... well the way bittorrent works
> you're only
> uploading things if people are downloading them from you.
> This means
> two things, firstly you have to be seeding something that
> someone out
> there actually wants and secondly if there are a bunch of
> seeds on the
> same torrent your connection might be too slow or have too
> high of a
> latency for anyone to download from you, as bittorrent
> gives strong
> preference to faster users.

Not a problem. Been doing torrents ok in the past.

> Anyhow, I hope that helps.  you might setup your client to
> seed all of
> those torrents and go and have a buddy try downloading one
> of them
> just to see if it work.  Also, what clients have you tried?
>  and what
> have been the results?  did you get any error messages?

My main problem with using bittorrent for linux is figuring out how to even start it seeding more than one file. I think that I saw how to make it seed one file, but since I wanted to make it seed multiple files at once, I never tried to seed just one. I also didn't notice how to control it once it was running. I did notice that bittorrent attempted to run when I started up linux, but it said something about no torrents found or something like that. I never found where to put torrents for it to upload or even how to tell bittorrent where to find the media files associated with the torrents. In KTorrent, there is a GUI that asks about all of that stuff. Since I will check into using rtorrent, hopefully, those problems will no longer be an issues.

I am familiar with using shell commands and such... been doing that for quite a while. It's just that the docs for it are rather sparse.



> cheers,
>
> .r'
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