courtesy of hotemetoot.
If you’ve got a large amount of data to transfer from one place to another, we all know BitTorrent is an extremely efficient way of doing it.
But sometimes you may want to transfer data which you don’t want to (or can’t) upload to a tracker on the Internet.
This is where uTorrent comes in handy, because it can act as your own private tracker.
You’ll need a few things before you begin:
1. A recent copy of uTorrent. 1.7.7 is the latest version, there’s no excuse not to use it.
2. Your external IP address. You can use http://www.whatismyipaddress.com to find this.
3. Your listen port in uTorrent. You can find this in uTorrent’s Options > Preferences > Connection > Port used for incoming connections.
4. You must be connectable! This won’t work if you don’t have port forwarding correctly configured.
Here’s what you need to do:
Open up uTorrent and go Options > Preferences > Advanced. Scroll down to find bt.enable_tracker and set it to True. Restart uTorrent for this to take effect.
Now, create a new torrent. As usual, browse to find the file or folder you wish to share.
For the tracker url, use the following information:
http://your_ip_address:your_listen_port/announce
So, for example, if your IP address is 123.123.123.123 and your listen port is 54321 then you would put this as your tracker url:
http://123.123.123.123:54321/announce
Remember to tick ‘Start Seeding’. Tick ‘Private Torrent’ to disable DHT and Peer Exchange for this torrent if you want to.
Now press ‘Create and save as..’ and save the .torrent file somewhere. uTorrent should now connect (to itself) and the tracker status should be ‘working’. You’ll note it has a 10 minute announce interval.
That’s all there is to it. You can now send that .torrent file to someone, they can open it in their torrent client and start downloading the content.
Want something more fancy than an IP address? Get yourself a domain name from somewhere like http://www.dyndns.com/services/dns/dyndns/ or from http://www.afraid.org.
Troubleshooting: If the connect times out and can’t find the tracker, you’ve done something wrong. Ensure you’ve got the correct IP address, port, and that uTorrent is definitely connectable from the outside. You can run uTorrent’s test for that by going to Options > Speed Guide and clicking Test if port is forwarded properly. Also, ensure you have a colon separating the IP address and port number!
Archived by FSFmirror
