>> 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)