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Solutions for Serving Lots of .torrents?

Posted by Cliff on from the legal-suprnova dept.

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?"

14 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. What I would do by Daxster · · Score: 3, Funny

    Rename all the files to something like "[porn star] hot secks bath tub", and list all the filename conversions on your website with HTML. Then distribute these torrents on popular trackers and let them handle the torrent :)

    --
    Death by snoo-snoo!
  2. Torrents suck, but.. by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  3. How about having no server at all? by AtariAmarok · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Check into www.ourmedia.org. You might be able to just uploaded your stuff there.

    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.

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
    1. Re:How about having no server at all? by torpor · · Score: 3, Interesting

      We want to host ourselves, 100%. The whole point of doing the free art thing is so that we can get involved in the delivery of it as well .. if we put our stuff on someone else's server, we have zero control over it.

      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 .. thats not the point of our project.

      --
      ; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
    2. Re:How about having no server at all? by runswithd6s · · Score: 2, Informative
      Of course, we're assuming that you've read http://www.bittorrent.com/guide.html, which shows you how to do it. Recent versions are trackerless, so setting up the tracker is no longer valid, though if you want to service the 3.x versions, you may still want to set one up.

      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.

      --
      assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */
  4. BitComet by Fry-kun · · Score: 4, Informative

    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"?
  5. The Matrix? by mr_rattles · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Am I missing something here? Why is the topic "The Matrix?"

    --
    Erik http://yakko.cs.wmich.edu/~rattles
  6. One tip... by Burianski11 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you're trying to save on bandwith costs, don't put a link to your site on /.

  7. Is there an actual problem? by Otter · · Score: 2, Informative
    As with a lot of P2P-related Ask Slashdots, it sounds like you have a solution in search of a problem.

    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...
  8. Thanks!!! by AtariAmarok · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Thanks. After the second message where someone said this was Matrix, I looked closer. That category icon I always thought was a red-and-blue pacifier was actually Morpheus' magic beans!

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
  9. No problems with that here.. by hacker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We're not having any trouble serving lots of torrent files from the same instance of the server. To the tune of over 109GiB of Plucker 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.

  10. Azureus by Guspaz · · Score: 2, Informative

    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/

    1. Re:Azureus by Dahan · · Score: 2, Interesting

      No, the whole point of btlaunchmany and btlaunchmanycurses is that you have one process that downloads/seeds a bunch of torrents.

  11. eztorrent by mrsam · · Score: 2, Informative

    When I was in a similar situation, I ended up writing eztorrent. You can find it on Freshmeat.

    Publishing BitTorrent content is as simple as copying the files into a directory, and running a single command. Eztorrent automatically creates the matching .torrent files, start the tracker, and start a seeder for each .torrent file.

    Files can be added or removed from the torrent directory at any time. A single command adds/removes any .torrent files, and starts or stop the seeders, without any downtime for any other, active torrents.