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.
- The Wikipedia Page … always a good place to start
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- Downloading your First Torrent: The Definitive Guide (2020 Update), by Rapidseed, they offer a proxy service but the article summarises the protocol well.
- 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
- 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.
- More on configuring deluge for the pi.
- 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
I removed some dead links. My qube is dead and I do not have sufficient admin rights on davelevy.info, so I need another answer if I want to persist with this.
I removed the following words from the article, which were about 10 years old, all the technology has come on a lot.
This was originally written at a time that the BT Home Hub needed the firewall configured, it was mentioned but no configuration documented, although I seem to remember that the port forwarding page need to be opened and the bit torrent protocol authorised.
I also removed mention of my now departed Cobalt Qube.
I removed the following comments from the page, “Having posted my copy of the snipsnap .tgz package and thinking about a presentation I was planing to do on privacy and copy right I began to investigate Bittorrent. The Pirate Bay trial is going on at the moment and the peer-to-peer nature of bt appeals to many libertarians.”
A video on Youtube that I originally found has gone, so I removed the link; it makes me think, might be best to record the titles and check which ones have gone.
I gave this page a major overhaul.