[CentOS-mirror] IPv6 Bittorrent tracker for CentOS torrents

Sun Oct 23 10:06:23 UTC 2011
Anssi Johansson <centosmirror at miuku.net>

Matt Domsch kirjoitti:
> You mention in the previous note that you're using opentracker.  What
> has your experience been with opentracker and IPv6?  It's been about a
> year since I looked into this for Fedora's use, but opentracker was
> too buggy (trivial to crash with a query URL) to be usable.  Has it
> improved enough to be considered stable?  Have they fixed it so you
> can have a single binary rather than two (one for IPv4 and one for
> IPv6) ?

Hi Matt, I believe you're referring to the discussion at 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=523540

I'm not particularly experienced with opentracker, it just happened to 
be the first tracker software that fulfilled my needs. The CentOS IPv6 
torrent tracker could use some other tracker software if necessary, but 
I don't see a particular reason why opentracker couldn't be used. We can 
investigate other possibilities if it appears that opentracker doesn't 
perform as expected.

The crash you mentioned was fixed about 1,5 years ago:
----
ot_stats.c
revision 1.60
date: 2010/04/09 09:40:12;  author: erdgeist;  state: Exp;  lines: +2 -2
Fix segfault in stats?mode=everything, an additional errorcode was not 
commited to ot_stats
----

Yes, apparently it's still required to edit the Makefile to select 
either IPv4 or IPv6, and if you enable IPv6 it'll disable IPv4. The same 
goes for selecting whether you want to use a whitelist or a blacklist. 
This is indeed a bit odd and makes the life of distribution package 
maintainers quite difficult. However, for this particular use case of 
CentOS IPv6 torrent tracker, I don't think compiling the software from 
source would be that much of a problem.

Besides, I'd prefer to have separate IPv4 and IPv6 trackers anyway, 
optimally even running on separate hosts for redundancy reasons. 
Obviously this redundancy would only benefit dual-stacked clients, and 
maintaining the whitelist across the IPv4 and IPv6 trackers would need 
some scripting.

I also think it'd be a conceptually neat idea that there would be one 
tracker that'd handle only IPv4 clients and another for IPv6 clients 
only. This way the IPv4 clients wouldn't get useless IPv6 peer addresses 
from the tracker and vice versa.

Some people might also want to use only IPv4 or IPv6 for 
economical/technical/ideological reasons, for example if IPv4/IPv6 
traffic is more expensive for them for some reason. Separating IPv4 and 
IPv6 to different trackers would help those persons, because they could 
then disable using the unneeded tracker within their BitTorrent client.