[CentOS] Trackerless torrents

William L. Maltby CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com
Thu Dec 20 19:27:23 UTC 2007


On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 10:34 -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
> >> when the CentOS tracker was down, I fired up uTorrent on a Windows box 
> >> w/ the 5.1 i386 dvd  torrent, and it managed to find a few dozen peers 
> >> in a few minutes...
> > Still blissful (ignorance is ...), hit me with a clue bat if I'm way off
> > base here.
> >
> > Now, that makes sense (IIUC the implications of all I've read and what
> > y'all have posted). You had already been successfully connected and
> > acquired the DHT during previous sessions. I can guess that this would
> > be used in place of an (un?)available tracker.
> >   
> 
> 
> last thing I'd torrented off centos was 5.0 prior to this...    Not sure 
> that would have any impact on hooking up with DHT on a different torrent 
> (but, I freely admit, I haven't the vaguest clue how the DHT actually 
> hooks up and finds the initial peers)

<supposition mode from past life>
IIRC and IIUC, the hashed keys you acquired, and http addresses that
were saved (if it's like bittorrent does it) could get it going. My
reading of the docs indicates that the hashed keys identify torrents and
the keys define name spaces, which are further sub-divided and
associated with nodes in the swarm to accomplish routing optimization.
Connecting with any peer with any key should cause you to receive a new
routing table, which I presume could (but may not need to) contain
any/all keys (torrent info?) that any node in the swarm had seen. Since
the hash algorithm that "defines" the CentOS images is well-known and
common, that could provide an entry even when there was no tracker if
the existing IP addresses (again, I assume they are retained) are polled
and any of them are running a DHT-enabled client and you possess a
torrent file with the appropriate key.
<supposition mode from past life>

Regardless of my meanderings, I'm comfortable now that "It Just Works".
I just can't stand not knowing how once I get curious. Hangover from a
past life.

> <snip sig stuff>

I'll post to one of the threads again if/when I complete my attempt at
making an RPM for the later bittorrent releases.

To the list: apologies for how for OT this has gone, but I've really
benefited and enjoyed it all. Maybe the stupid politics isn't really
enough to keep me from re-entering the biz again after all.

8-O <*slaps face*>

-- 
Bill




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