I have looked at Bittorrent on and off over the years. It is now controversial as it is the preferred filesharing solution of choice for copyright pirates but it has significant other uses and benefits. It was probably designed to  cope with site or server bandwidth scarcity in a client server transaction. I first created this page in May 2009 as a result of and to aid my experimentation with bittorrent clients. I had another 10 years later and significantly updated the page. As ever, see below/overleaf for my notes.

One of my inspirations was to create a bittorrent swarm for my snipsnap binaries. My experiments involved using the then named “Open Office” which had its own torrent download. (In one solution, I would act as a seeder and in the second I would act a peer.

1. The Wikipedia Page … always a good place to start
2. A review of the economics and history of the founding company by Simon Morris; I take from this that bittorrent the company protected itself from closure and legal attack by managing its intent i.e. working hard to avoid illegal use and recognising that there were “substantial non-infringing use-cases”.

2019

1. BitTorrent Beginner’s Guide: Everything You Need to Know, they say, “BitTorrent file-sharing technology isn’t just for pirates. Here’s how to access the rich troves of legitimate and legal content.” They list their top three clients.
2. 25 Best Torrent Sites (Most Popular in 2020), an article on the protocol and the role of trackers, listing the most popular at the time of publication.
3. Downloading your First Torrent: The Definitive Guide (2020 Update), by Rapidseed, they offer a proxy service but the article summarises the protocol well.
4. The Best VPNs for Torrenting 2020 – Should you torrent a VPN?, by proprivacy; let’s all remember that both torrenting and privacy & anonymity are legal, and in many ways protected human rights.

Raspbian & Deluge

1. How to Turn a Raspberry Pi into an Always-On BitTorrent Box, from how to geek, they recommend using deluge and discuss the three ways to connect to the server, configuring the daemon and connecting to the internet. The three connection modes are the text console, web-ui and a GTK console. The GTK console is not available on Raspbian, but is available for the usual culprits. The deluge download page, where a windows thin client exist.
2. More on configuring deluge for the pi., a good script for the install, which includes service files; it also installs an application enclosed password, which is used by the thin client, and more on the thin client from rapidseedbox.
3. To create a new torrent, you need the thin client aka GTK Console, here is a proprietary user manual, from Rapid Seedbox, on creating a new torrent. The GTK tool needs the application password. See also “How to make a torrent file” from helpdesk geek. The web console also has a password.
4. How to load a torrent using deluge, from rapidseedbox
5. lmgtgy: we need one of more high reputation trackers
6. lmgtfy: how to run a bit torrent server on raspbian, a list of articles on installing software.

Ubuntu

There is quite a lot of choice if using Ubuntu, and it ships with a package called Transmission. While interested in Ubuntu & μtorrent, I found this, a utserver.conf at github.

Early findings

Most of these were found in the early days of this page.

• A google search for the word  maketorrent, this, I think returns resources that help make a torrent file.
• How to create a torrent, by Torrent Freak interesting blog name, documents how to use then popular clients to create a torrent and post to a tracker
• Here’s some free and legal tracker sites., it points at an article called Best Free Torrent Search Engines

Deluge

This seems the PI tool of choice, I found this at PiMyLifeUp.