Comments on: What about TrackerExchange?

By: Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 12:12:50 +0000

Oh, also if you copy and paste the hash into http://isohunt.com/ you can find all copies of the torrent currently in action.

By: Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 12:05:19 +0000

DHT only works for torrents with the same hash.

If two torrents have the same hash, it means they have the same exact files and file names. The hash looks like this:

The only way you can exchange peers is with DHT or PeX (the new standard in µTorrent and Azureus) and it works regardless of whether trackers online or not – just so long as it’s not labeled as a “private” torrent (meaning DHT is disabled), the other peers are using a DHT- or PeX-compatible client, and their torrent has the same hash as yours.

By: brandon

brandon — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 10:03:08 +0000

i was 25% done on a demonoid torrent when they disappeared, it kept going on dht for a while but then stopped. is there a way to resurrect this and other demonoid torrents that are still available on sites like mininova. mininova says there is one seed and one peer on another demonoid torrent but when i open it in azureus i get the tracker error and 0 seeds and 0 peers, is there something else that i can do? so if torrent 1 had 3 peers A B and C and C opens DHT torrent 2 with no tracker, then he’s only going to start downloading if A is connected to X and X is downloading torrent 2? is that how exchanging peers works? does DHT work across torrents? how can you connect to any peers if the tracker is down or dead?

By: vlsi0n

vlsi0n — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 01:16:48 +0000

Also thought I’d add, private communities disable DHT and peer exchange so they can control who downloads their files. So there are reasons to not use these.

By: Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 11:03:30 +0000

I thought DHT was an add-on, but I guess its now a part of the bittorrent protocol. But at any rate, that's neither here nor there. The whole point is, we need trackers, not peers. DHT allows for trackerless data exchange between two or more peers - a decentralized network.

But the whole point is, trackerless torrents are a LOT slower than those with trackers. So long as data is being exchanged between peers, why not exchange tracker info too?

By: TuxPaper

TuxPaper — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 10:00:39 +0000

I think you are a bit confused. While peer exchange can be done via DHT, in some (most?) clients, it is done with other peers via normal means (usually bittorrent protocol extension). DHT for bittorrent is actually giving you more than than your idea, since it allows .torrent delivery with no trackers.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_clients :

DHT permits use of trackerless torrents (with supporting clients) to resume normal torrents when their tracker is down.