I've been unsuccesful in trying to set up a bit torrent client on my dedicated box. I'm tired of having to always be seeding torrents from my home PC and would like to be seeding them off my dedicated box, but right now I'm at a loss for what to do. Has anyone tried this? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

Try this link:
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/guide.html

Are you trying to set up a tracker or a client?

In any case the link already provided should be the documentation you need.

Good luck!

thanks, but bram's original guide doesnt really explain anything at all. I'm not trying to set up a tracker, and I'm also not trying to just make the torrent file available for download off my server (both those things are relativly easy to do and have many good guides explaining how-to). What I am trying to do is SEED a torrent off my server. EXAMPLE--> As it currently stands when I have a file I wish to share via bittorrent I create the torrent at home, upload the torrent to my server for people to download, and seed the torrent from my home PC. This works fine but lacks in 2 main areas, 1) my upload from home isnt spectacular and it takes a while to seed if the file is large, much longet than if I could seed from the server whos upload it 10Mb, 2) the home PC can't seed the file indefinetly, and if I have to stop seeding for an afternoon or a day or two no-one can get the file, where if I could seed off my server I could have the torrent seeding 24-7.

I hope this example better explains to you what I'm trying to do. It's something I havent found a good explanation for for a windows or linux box. (BTW I'm running red hat enterprise if someone knows the command line maybe)

Originally posted by john117
I've been unsuccesful in trying to set up a bit torrent client on my dedicated box. I'm tired of having to always be seeding torrents from my home PC and would like to be seeding them off my dedicated box, but right now I'm at a loss for what to do. Has anyone tried this? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

Sounds like you're on the right track - install command line bittorrent client, seed, done. What is the problem you are having installing the client?

Right, you just want to use the standard bittorrent command line client included in the bt distribution.

The command line used for seeding is the same as that used for downloading.

Let us know what problem you're encountering :)

Note that unless you are on a dedicated server, your provider might block the ports that are necessary for bt to work properly.

You also (depending on your setup) might not have permission to run scripts in the background, or run server processes. Best to check with your provider first, before doing something like this.

He specifically stated the box was dedicated.

Well, even if he did (which I missed, so I apologize) his provider might not allow such progams to be run on their servers.

He should verify first.

Any good provider should allow bittorrent :-)

It is a forms of sharing files like ftp, http.

Hosts banning bittorrent are stupid. FTP can also be abused just like bittorrent.

Anyway this post has helped me make my server seed large files. :-)

Is there a way to limit upload bandwidth or how much bandwidth can be transferred eg Max 50gb? Or even better until there are say 100 seeds seeding the file?

I don't think the original bt client allows upload rate limiting but some newer ones do.

One thing thats confuses me is the lines talking about configuring for torrents on your server, what exactly do the following lines "do" in terms on configuring your server?


How do I configure a web server for .torrent files?
You must associate files ending in .torrent with the Content-Type application/x-bittorrent. For Apache, you should add the line:

AddType application/x-bittorrent .torrent

to your httpd.conf configuration file. If you cannot modify the main httpd.conf file (such as in the case of a shared or virtual hosting scenario), you can also put the above AddType directive in a .htaccess file. This presumes that the server's administrator has enabled this ability with the AllowOverride FileInfo directive. Also note that settings in a .htaccess file only apply to the directory containing the file, so make sure this is the directory that will contain the .torrent files.

Alternatively, you can add the line:

application/x-bittorrent .torrent

to your mime.types file, which is used if the TypesConfig directive is present in httpd.conf.

That is for allowing people do download torrent files using apache.

Without those lines apache will not know the correct mime-type, and will serve the files as a generic type application/octet-stream.

If you are not providing .torrent files using a Web server those lines have nothing to do with you.

thats what I'd assumed, but I've never added those lines of code as of yet, but I've been serving torrent files for about 4 monthes now with no complaints.

I think maybe some of my problems are in finding the proper command line client for red hat (i wouldnt mind something like curses for mandrake)

Download the Python source code and extract it, go into the folder.

./btdownloadcurses.py --url "http://domain.com/example.torrent" --saveas "FileName.thing"