Torrents over LAN?

B

bob

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This has been discussed breifley once before, and I cant seem to find the post.

Someone was talking about hosting a torrent on a LAN (offline from the internet). Ive always found that torrents are completley useless, except for certain (il)legal uses. At least, untill now.

Every time I go to a LAN party, people are always sitting around downloading patches, maps, mods etc off one person to update themselves. This normally isnt a problem, but when more than one person tries to move 1GB+ of data, off one PC... it takes awhile over 100Mb.

I was wondering if there is some way of setting up a PC as a torrent server. The idea is, since its a switch... as long as there is more than one source for the file, it shouldnt take as long if more people suddenly decide to update.

Any suggestions on software I could look into?
 
I'm no expert but wouldn't that saturate your 100Mb limit all the same?
 
Yes but everyone would be getting it off everyone else thus faster. What you need to do it setup a local tracker. Never setup a tracker mysefl so you need to look into it but I know that's what you need to do :)
 
BitTorrent distributes seeding among other nodes who are getting the file. It will indeed help him if he can get it working the way he describes. (Sorry though, I have no idea as to how to do that, but I do know for a fact that Limewire supports downloading over a LAN, so you might want to look into that.)
 
Should work like this:

Setup tracker on a local machine, can be done through many available systems, or through the source code of the official bit-torrent client. Then, when creating the torrent files for everyone to use, set the tracker using the local ip (eg. http://192.168.0.1/announce).

That'll do it for ya.
 
Thanks for all of the quick replies. Ill look into the local torrents and see what I can turn up, usually any LAN gamer already has a torrent downloader such as uTorrent, this should be a fairly easy and free way to speed things up.


If I can/cant get something working, Ill post a reply.
 
I've run into the same issue(Not saturating 100Mb, but saturating HDD random read throughput). We are on an all gigabit lan, but can't sustain over 25MB/sec from the file server. A single user pulling can do 44MB/sec, but when you have multiple users, it drops to 25MB/sec. Which isn't that bad really. Last lan, the fileserver did over 1TB of output in 12 hours.

I tried DirectConnect, but that didnt work too well(Slow(5MB/sec), probably because I can't seem to get it to use larger than 3MB chunks).

In the end, I am back to plain old Samba, untill I find a better solution for hosting 1.8TB of files at the lan.
 
Well that's the idea of the torrent system, where it becomes a bunch of people hosting the file, so it doesnt max out a connection or harddrive.
 
using mass multi p2p would flood a lan with protocol overhead

also you'd run into much more bottlenecks on indevidule machines, (hd having to locate pieces for many torrents, cross- switch bottlenecks, bottle necks on systems)

if you had a system were only fast fileservers did the uploading it would be slightly better than a simple file server or server group with load balancing, but i dotn know what the hurdles for setup,
 
nova_rock said:
using mass multi p2p would flood a lan with protocol overhead

also you'd run into much more bottlenecks on indevidule machines, (hd having to locate pieces for many torrents, cross- switch bottlenecks, bottle necks on systems)

if you had a system were only fast fileservers did the uploading it would be slightly better than a simple file server or server group with load balancing, but i dotn know what the hurdles for setup,
Click to expand...

I cant see how the LAN would be any more overloaded than using it over internet, seeing how with uTorrent I can usually get close to ~1-1.5Mbps on my 4 meg connection. The problem is, any kind of "fast" file server isnt going to be cheap. Most of the time, there isnt more than 10 people to the LANs I attend, though awhile ago one was close to 20. Assuming that at least half of the 20 people needed to download things, that comes out to around 10MBps per user, or 800Mbps total. I cant even maintain over 300Mbps with 1GigE, and a "server" to sustain that wouldnt be cheap, nor worth it in my situation.

Ive tried downloading two tracker toolkits (one was called BNBT), both of them seemed to not work at all, at least not under Windows NT 4. I read that uTorrent could be set up to have trackerless torrents (DHT mode?), after enabling the trackerless torrent option in uTorrent I pointing my desktops browser to the file-servers utorrent address, and my browser puked out some garbage.

Anyone else have any windows NT4 compatible ideas? I think ive googled this question to death, and im about ready to give up on the P2P @ LAN plan.
 
depending on how powerful your machine is, you could run the free VMWare server (at least it was free last I checked) and run NT4 on one VM and linux or similar on another, which may provide you with more options for trackers.
 
My friends and I have a tracker setup so we can share files with one another. We use a tracker system called Defiant. You just upload it to a webserver (in our case apache), and then you're pretty much set, upload torrents to it so they're listed, easy as pie!

If you want to really get into it PM me.
 
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