October 15, 2004
Drazen on BitTorrent

Thanks to Drazen Pantic, we have a very clear explanation of the BitTorrent process. Jay Dedman has initiated a project to create a simple script to start the BitTorrent process. Drazen has one that he uses that may be adapted.

Click "More" for Drazen's explanation.

Basically, there are two sides to the process: download (seeding and
leaching) and tracking (server side). Only tracker is designed to act
as a server. Its function is to keep track of all active downloders and
then pass that info to subsequent downloaders. Trackers could be more
or less communal, depending how much authentication is required ...

Download process always starts with the torrent file from a Web server
and then downloading the file torrent refers to. The process of
downloading is called "leaching" while in process and when finished
"seeding". So, seeders are downloaders who have completed the
download, but left their BitTorrent client open even after the full
download.

Now, in order to start seeding one needs to do (in this order):

* create torrent file towards a specific tracker;
* put torrent file next to the file we want to seed;
* upload torrent file to the tracker server;
* start (fake) download process of that file.


On Dv Guide I use automatic seeding mechanism - have all the torrents
and corresponding files in one folder and then run one of the Python
scripts (btlaunchmany.py) in the background all the time ...

Hope this helps

Posted by Dave at October 15, 2004 10:23 AM