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Solutions for Serving Lots of .torrents?
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?"
btlaunchmany can be set to read torrents from a directory. Just throw the .torrent in and it will automaticly start downloading it/seed it when its done. You could easily crontab it and then just ftp upload to the dir. Removing a file is as easy as deleting the torrent.
Im sure theres a pretty web based solution for the cpanel 'admins' out there too, just google around.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
BitComet can serve multiple torrents with different priorities, all within the same instance of the program
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
There's always freshmeat to search for options. EZTorrent appears to be what you want. mod_bt also looks promising if you're using Apache 2.x.
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I don't think that solves his problem though, since he would still need once instance per torrent file, unless I'm mistaken.
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 one application/instance.
More info at http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
When I was in a similar situation, I ended up writing eztorrent. You can find it on Freshmeat.
.torrent files, start the tracker, and start a seeder for each .torrent file.
.torrent files, and starts or stop the seeders, without any downtime for any other, active torrents.
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