Help me make a torrent... torrent.

December 27, 2010 4:07 AM

[BitTorrentFilter] I've made a torrent (of an interesting collection of music videos) that I want to distribute. Research about recent reliable trackers led me to use the one provided by PublicBitTorrent. But test-launching the torrent file from another computer shows me that no downloading (nor corresponding uploading) occurs. Is it the tracker, or what else might I have done wrong?

I made the torrent on a Mac with Vuze (albeit in it's old-style Azureus guise), and I'm testing the download on the same connection from another Mac with Transmission. Though it's not the very first time I'm doing this, I still feel quite the novice.

Any&other advice - better/other trackers, whether to host the torrent on a tracker site (now that the PB is no more), etc. - greatly appreciated.

posted by progosk to computers & internet (12 answers total)

Just a check-- did you make sure to redownload the .torrent file from the tracker on the machine that's initially seeding the file?
posted by strangecargo at 4:21 AM on December 27, 2010

erm... PublicBitTorrent doesn't index, so there's no file to redownload, as far as I'm aware. It's a step that I would have doen if I'd used an indexing tracker (like TPB was), but I'm not sure what the procedure is in my current case.
posted by progosk at 4:29 AM on December 27, 2010

Could you upload it to a site such as Torrent Reactor or Torrent Box? Please post a link if you do.
posted by JonB at 4:54 AM on December 27, 2010

In that case, I don't think you should need to redownload the torrent... The only time I ever created a torrent for a non-indexed .torrent myself, I used the functionality built into Transmission, which worked like a charm, once I managed to enter the tracker URL properly.
posted by strangecargo at 4:54 AM on December 27, 2010

What JonB said too. It would be much easier to debug if the .torrent file was available for inspection.
posted by strangecargo at 4:55 AM on December 27, 2010

(Not exactly an answer to your question, but TPB is back up after a weekend outage.)
posted by mykescipark at 4:59 AM on December 27, 2010

JonB, strangecargo: I'd be happy to mail the torrent file for inspection/debugging, but ideally I'd prefer not publishing it on an indexing site until I know it works (so as not to have files with wrong info errant out there).

mykescipark: so is TPB still a good/useful option, as a tracker to add into the torrent file?
posted by progosk at 5:29 AM on December 27, 2010

Two separate bittorrent clients behind a NAT router will only be able to see each other if the router has loopback enabled. That is to say, outbound traffic trying to establish a connection to your external IP address that originates from behind the NAT device needs to be reflected back to your network by the router in order for this to work, a feature that not every router has (or has enabled.) So your test is not necessarily valid.
posted by Rhomboid at 6:01 AM on December 27, 2010

OK, Rhomboid, that actually sounds like the kind of issue that I was suspecting. In which case the only quck&reliable way I can run a test is to have someone external to my NAT router launch the torrent file, correct?
posted by progosk at 6:15 AM on December 27, 2010

do you have a port forward enabled on your router in to the seed box on whatever port you're using? without that, your seed will almost certainly not get off the ground - for one device behind a NAT router to connect to another device behind another NAT router at least one of them has to have an appropriate port forward configured. (and most of your potential downloaders are almost certainly behind NAT)

even if you do this, testing from another machine on the same local network almost certainly won't work (as Rhomboid said) since the router won't bounce connections back in to the second internal host.

what you need to do is set up an appropriate port forward (this should be covered in the Azureus docs) and then get someone to test from a different site. in theory that should do the trick.
posted by russm at 6:23 AM on December 27, 2010

I have seeded other torrents from the same Mac&Azureus/Vuze that I used for this new one, the only difference is that for those I used either TPB or a private tracker, thather than the PublicBitTorrent one, so I think my set-up is OK for seeding/uploading. I'll have some external testing done, then.
posted by progosk at 6:40 AM on December 27, 2010

There's demonoid, don't ever forget demonoid. PM for invite.
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 11:27 AM on December 27, 2010 [1 favorite]