On Wed, 2007-12-19 at 18:20 -0800, John R Pierce wrote: > William L. Maltby wrote: > > 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. Port forwarding through my firewall, generation > > and publishing (I currently have no http presence) of a torrent file, > > getting one of my computers to the DMZ (I use IPCop and right now all > > are in the green zone),... In fact, the /usr/share/doc bitorrent files > > say I need to start with a tracker. > > > > > 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 and pretty quickly was downloading at close to my > wirespeed. Within about half an hour, I was uploading at 60% of my > bandwidth and still climbing, and it showed that there were 118 or > something available peers, but uTorrent tends to only connect to 30 or > so at once to keep the traffic efficient. 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. However, if one had not used a DHT-enabled client previously (my case), the CentOS torrent server was inoperative and the torrent file provided only specified one tracker URL, one should be SOL. After examining some other torrent files, it *seems* that multiple tracker URLs can be specified. Maybe this is all it takes to eliminate brief outages such as were recently experienced by non-DHT-enabled clients? This means that some community member would need to host a redundant tracker, torrents and images and the torrent file at the various trackers would have a complete list. Is it worth the effort? AFAICR, the recent outage was a wetware problem at a "critical" time and, ironically, caused by the bad judgment when the resulting workload was seen. I don't recall other instances of unavailability. Is 99.9(...9?) good enough? I guess it depends which end of the pipe you're on and attitude ATM ;-) > > i just fired it back up to go ahead and share, I'm seeing 180 seeds and > 190 peers on i386, and 116/54 on x86_64... I'll leave it running for > the holidays at least. I killed the rtorrent for the two 5.1 torrents and started bittorrent- GUI on them. All is working well and the rtorrent, delivering 4.6 stuff, and bittorrent (5.1 stuff) are playing nicely and sharing the bandwidth well. After seeding for an indeterminate time, I'll kill the GUI and start the console or ncurses bittorrent with the --trackerless option and see if it uses the DHT/routing and other information that bittorrent seems to stash in ~/.bittorrent/data directory. This depends on the presence of other active clients, of course. I'll post backin a day or two. Meanwhile, redundancy anyone? > <snip sif stuff> -- Bill