[CentOS] Trackerless torrents (was: Can't connect to torrent tracker)

[Kai Schaetzl]

1198111906.5525.38.camel at centos01.homegroannetworking>
X-Rcpt-To: <centos at centos.org>

William L. Maltby wrote on Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:51:39 -0500:

> Ah, yes. It sounds so simple. But I've been perusing the various
> references available (bittorrent ones are sparse - no man pages) and if
> I want to seed beginning with the ones I've already downloaded, it seems
> to get more complicated.

I think you are trying to seed a *new* "unofficial" torrent. That's not 
what you want to do. See below.

> 
> I presume this assumes I'm downloading originally. Then, if starting in
> tracking mode, how does one switch to "trackerless" or DHT? From reading
> some of the refs in other posts, it seems that I would need to be
> downloading from a client that supports the DHT schema. Meaning that
> when I start downloading, my presence is added to the hash (or is it
> routing?) tables and forwarded to peers in the network and I would have
> to receive them also. Does the service CentOS is using support all this?

It doesn't need to support this. The important thing is that *you* have to 
use a DHT client. utorrent uses this automatically (you can switch it 
on/off in the options, though). So, you have to look in the client 
documentation if and how it supports DHT (which seems to be the 
abbreviation for Distributed Hash Table).
What you then simply do is fire up that client and get the CentOS torrent 
and keep it running once you got it. That's all. In case there's no 
tracker connectable DHT-aware clients will talk to each other and look for 
the hash. Which means if you already got it you can serve it. Or if you 
don't have it yet you can get it from others. Without a tracker. 
The important part is that all the DHT clients use the same torrent file 
for starting up the download. If you download the file by other means and 
then start seeding it (by creating your own torrent file and uploading it 
to a tracker) you start a new torrent "cloud" or whatever you want to call 
it.
I'm sure there are ways to "trick" around this and use an existing torrent 
file with data that were downloaded a different way. Maybe just start a 
download, stop it and then replace the file with a complete one.

Here's what's currently getting seeded:
http://www.mininova.org/search/?search=Centos+5.1
The seed/leech ratio seems to be ok.


Kai

-- 
Kai Schätzl, Berlin, Germany
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