Torrents Update

[Paul..]

We’ve been through some changes on the torrent front recently. Here’s a brief history.

1. Linuxtracker.org became unusable. For years, we posted our releases on linuxtracker.org but like many other free bittorrent trackers the site became plagued with malware and offensive spam, so we dropped it and moved to archive.org.
2. Archive.org worked for a while. But our initial success ended quickly when archive.org started blocking downloads from non-members. So we moved to the big network behind the scenes at archive.org, Amazon S3.
3. Amazon S3 charged too much. The setup was easy, but we soon found out that Amazon S3 was charging us more money than we wanted to pay, so we decided to build our own torrent tracker service.
4. MX Torrent Service...so far so good with MX-18.2 release. Thanks to the skills and ingenuity of Tim (timkb4cq) we now have our own redundant tracker/seeder service. Using VPS (Virtual Private Servers) we have built two servers running opentracker and seeding software. The trackers use whitelists so they only accept requests for MX .torrent files. Torrent files can be downloaded from: https://mxlinux.org/torrent-files/
   
   As always, we are open to good ideas and suggestions. And we are particularly interested in data on how the torrent network is handling distribution of the recent MX-18.2 release in far flung locations.
   
   
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   tl;dr...Anticipated FAQs
   
   What are torrent trackers and seeders?
   
   Bittorrent trackers and seeders are just two software elements running on a server. Trackers assist peers in the process of finding one another in a torrent network and they facilitate seeding. The most commonly used tracker software is probably opentracker, created and maintained by Dirk Engling (http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/opentracker/). Seeders are usually headless versions of bittorrent clients that can be run as daemons (e.g., qbittorrent, rtorrent, transmission) and are usually managed from command line.
   
   Why don’t we make use of free trackers like coppersurfer.tk and others?
   
   If you take a look at their webpage, coppersurfer.tk and you will see that they also use opentracker by Dirk Engling as the tracker. This is one of thousands of free trackers out there...with no whitelist on the tracker, traffic can come from anywhere. MX uses two dedicated VPS (Virtual Private Servers) to run our trackers so we don’t need to be burdened with entertainment or other traffic. We also use a whitelist on each of our trackers to deny access to non-MX traffic.
   
   What is Webseeding, or GetRight-style Webseeding?
   
   Webseeding is used by some content sites such as archive.org. In simplest terms, Webseeding allows bittorrent clients to use http to download the content directly from a server instead of using the peer connections of a torrent swarm (Note: this is a gross oversimplification, but essentially correct). Webseeding works well for archive.org because they host a large number of files for a large number of users and can’t rely on a torrent swarm being in place for each individual file they host. This approach works for archive.org because they use the big pipes and world-wide distribution network of Amazon’s S3 service. In the case of distributing .iso files, MX uses a bittorrent swarm of volunteers to reduce the demand on the torrent servers and to reach users in far away locations that may have slow network links. In our case, the bittorrent swarm is community-built for the distribution of MX Linux .iso files.

[sunrat]

I'm in Melbourne Australia with a ~18Mb/s ADSL2 connection. Downloading 18.2 maxed out the download speed with about 54/132 seeders connected, took 14:34 to complete.
I'd say it's working well!

[Jerry3904]

Fine with, Paul! Much appreciated.

[dolphin_oracle]

Nicely done guys! Thanks!