Solutions for Serving Lots of .torrents? 53
torpor asks: "For 10 years now my friends and I have managed to form a loose musicians collective with the purpose of putting our totally free music/art online for free access.
Lately, we've been discussing the approach we can take to utilize BitTorrent to do our file distribution, with the idea being that we can use it to cut our bandwidth costs from that of a single server, and 'spread the bandwidth' among us for hosting files.
However, we've found that serving a large number of torrent feeds from one server is not quite so easy as it sounds, as it appears we have to have a single instance -per file- of the torrent server.
What solutions are available for Bittorrent-like distribution of media files? We're a small group of budding stars, and we want our tunes out there in the free world. Are we limited to continuing to serve things by HTTP, or are there easy/simple ways of starting a large-quantity of torrent feeds which, perhaps in our fervour, we're overlooking?"
What I would do (Score:3, Funny)
Torrents suck, but.. (Score:5, Informative)
Im sure theres a pretty web based solution for the cpanel 'admins' out there too, just google around.
Azureus (Score:3, Informative)
The answer is an application like Azureus. It handles everything itself. It serves up the torrent files with a built in HTTP server, it acts as the tracker for all torrents, and it acts as the client to seed each torrent. It allows very powerful rules about when to seed which file, how fast/how much, and so on.
So the net result is you can handle the entire hosting procedure with just
Re:Azureus (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Azureus (Score:2)
Re:Azureus (Score:1)
It sounds like the original poster should ask someone at a site like dimeadozen, etree, or tradersden what they are currently using to manage the numerous torrents they are hosting. As far as I know, they still need a seeder process for each torrent. Maybe there is a server version of azureus.
Re:Azureus (Score:2)
Re:Azureus (Score:1)
Re:Azureus (Score:1)
Re:Azureus (Score:2)
Re:Azureus (Score:2)
Has azureus fixed its memory leaks? It has some *severe* problems, so much so that it locks up my X server on a daily basis.
Re:Azureus (Score:2)
How about having no server at all? (Score:4, Interesting)
It is just starting out and has problems, but if it shapes up the way they intend, it sounds like it would be perfect for you to host any of your art elsewhere with whatever licensing you want. If this works out, it would be a lot simpler, too. Certainly it would be easy to test. The worst thing I have seen is that it often takes 30+ hours for something you uploaded to be listed.
Re:How about having no server at all? (Score:3, Interesting)
But if we start the distribution from a system we own and control and monitor ourselves, it puts us in the position we want to be in, as artists, to keep track of things. Putting it on some other host just gives that host the right to manage our free art accordingly
Re:How about having no server at all? (Score:2)
Have you looked into ourmedia.org? Their fine print looks to leave you in control of the stuff. You can even delete it. The problems I see with it are technical "does not work as well as it is supposed to" rather than "I give up control of my stuff".
We Have Our Own Server. (Score:1)
Thats the point. We don't want unknown-entity/3rd-party Jones to have anything to do with it: we're fully DIY...
Re:We Have Our Own Server. (Score:2)
Re:How about having no server at all? (Score:1)
You said:
For 10 years now my friends and I have managed to form a loose musicians collective with the purpose of putting our totally free music/art online for free access.
Then you said:
if we put our stuff on someone else's server, we have zero control over it.
Putting it on some other host just gives that host the right to manage our free art accordingly .. thats not the point of our project.
I think you are using a different definition of "totally free" to the popular one here. Coul
Re:How about having no server at all? (Score:2)
I think it is pretty clear that they want to be the access point for their free stuff. They don't want others to be the access point, due to concerns that others will charge for it, alter it, place restrictions, add odd download requirements, or other odd things that strangers could do with it.
Re:How about having no server at all? (Score:2)
I think the intent is to keep everything under Ampfea's direct control. If this needs hardware or bandwidth, we'll have a whip round (and not stick ads on anything) to fund it, if it breaks, Ampfea's tech guys will fix it. In short, if it's in-house, everything will be d
Re:How about having no server at all? (Score:1)
the point is: we want to be the source of our free material, not someone else. it is free, but we want it to be free from us
its a collective with the purpose of providing ourselves with the means to deliver free content easily
Re:How about having no server at all? (Score:3, Informative)
There's always freshmeat [freshmeat.net] to search [freshmeat.net] for options. EZTorrent [freshmeat.net] appears to be what you want. mod_bt [freshmeat.net] also looks promising if you're using Apache 2.x.
BitComet (Score:4, Informative)
The Matrix? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The Matrix? (Score:2)
Thanks!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Thanks!!! (Score:2)
One tip... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One tip... (Score:2)
Is there an actual problem? (Score:3, Informative)
The value of P2P comes on several fronts: obviously, it's ideal for illegal sharing (which doesn't concern you), BitTorrent in particular is good for huge legal files with huge demand peaks (e.g. new Linux distribution ISOs and it's good for large distributed bodies of files (like Furthur.net).
In your case, a website and HTTP distribution seems the best way to go, despite its unsexiness. You control the process, so you can track downloads and referrers and you can make sure that things work properly, so your new fans don't suffer. Just bite the bullet and pay a good hosting provider.
Re:Is there an actual problem? (Score:1)
We want to use Torrent because it 'spreads the load' easily, without needing a big management back-end to watch our bandwidth usage...
We've used HTTP distribution for 10 years now
Re:Is there an actual problem? (Score:2)
Another advantage of BitTorrent is that other people can easily join in to reduce your bandwidth costs.
When somebody recently a book [accelerando.org] via BitTorrent, I thought that was pretty cool, and wanted to help out. I joined all the t
Using BitTorrent on Linux (Score:2)
HE.net is your friend (Score:2)
FYI: I don't work for them or anything; I'm just a very pleased customer.
What is the Matrix? (Score:1, Offtopic)
That day arrived today.
No problems with that here.. (Score:4, Interesting)
We're not having any trouble serving lots of torrent files [plkr.org] from the same instance of the server. To the tune of over 109GiB of Plucker [plkr.org] torrent downloads this year.
That doesn't count the downloads over http, rsync, and through our mirrors. Probably another 200GiB there, rough estimate.
I use bttrack and point it to the torrent directory (locked with --allowed_dir of course), and it works great.
I run a separate server on a separate port for various projects, to separate the torrents per-project. No issues at all.
Re:No problems with that here.. (Score:2)
Replying to myself here... I just did a quick check and we've served up 25,502,515,260 bytes over http for one of those files (plucker_desktop, Windows build) THIS MONTH on the primary server.
Since we round-robin across 3 mirrors, that could potentially be 75GiB for this month alone for that one single download (10,241,974 byte file).
Its massive, and that's the primary reason we started moving to BitTorrent to help distribute those downloads.
Try Dijjer (Score:2)
http://dijjer.org/ [dijjer.org]
neologism! (Score:2)
Customize a podcasting feed and augment Azureus or something to handle it. Neat!
Re:neologism! (Score:2)
btlaunchmany.py (Score:2)
Re:How about this... (Score:1)
Perhaps throw in an html page with whatever descriptions/titles you have already done on your site, and link to the local torrents. I think it would work.
(That wasn't very clear was it? Bah.)
Piratebay (Score:2)
Ask ThePirateBay!!
eztorrent (Score:3, Informative)
Publishing BitTorrent content is as simple as copying the files into a directory, and running a single command. Eztorrent automatically creates the matching
Files can be added or removed from the torrent directory at any time. A single command adds/removes any
eztree (Score:1)