InfoHole A blog by Gordon R. Page

15Oct/077

Bittorrent for linux

If your ISP, like mine, throttles p2p traffic and you have access to a server it may well be quicker to download the torrent on your server and then download it via http or ftp to your computer.

I have just installed the official Bittorrent client on Centos. Installation was as easy as "yum install bittorrent". Be sure to open up port 6881-6889 on your firewall, and if you're running APF firewall remove those port numbers from the BLK_P2P_PORTS setting in conf.apf.

Once installed I was able to download the latest CentOS distro in a matter of minutes and then download it via my home connection at 400KB/sec (much better than the throttled p2p home speed of 10KB/sec).

Usage of the bittorrent via the command line was like so:

bittorrent-curses --max_upload_rate 3000 --max_uploads 500 CentOS-5.0-i386-bin-DVD.torrent

As you can see I limited my upload speed to 3MB/sec (24mbit/sec) . You should make sure to limit your upload speed in accordance with how much bandwidth your server is allowed to use, especially if you are going to leave it running over night.

An ideal solution might be to have your torrents download on your server and use a cron job to automatically rsync your torrent download folder to your home network daily or hourly as desired. Infrant NAS units have rsync on them by default which means you don't even need to setup rsync or a linux server on your home network.

bittorrent client

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  1. that dosnt work ;) you need to add the repository that you use like livna or something like taht because the default ones dont have that file

  2. Correct, my mistake. I have centos plus enabled. Google for “enable centos plus repo” for info on how to do that.

  3. Limiting upload is just fine, no problem. The issue is that it uses all available download bandwidth. How can you limit that with the official client? (Is there another command-line client?)

  4. Yes, it is the same format, e.g.

    –max_download_rate 3000

  5. No! U can’t limit the download.. unfortunatelly =/

    ”–max_download_rate xx” or ”-–max_download_rate xx” doesnt work.

  6. Hmmm – not sure what version of CentOS you are using, but as of CentOS 5.2 there is no bittorrent in any of the centos repos, not even in centosplus and epel.

    As a previous poster asked, what exact repo did YOU download bittorrent from? You should be able to get this info from yum (e.g. yum list bittorrent). Also, what version of CentOS are you running, and are the contents of your /etc/yum.repos.d/ unmodified or do they contain any extra non-centos repos definitions?

  7. bittorrent.noarch 4.4.0-5.el5.kb kbs-CentOS-Testi

    Seems to be:
    kbs-CentOS-Extras


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