[geeks] Debian 4.0 Bittorrent for DVD

[Chad McAuley]

On 4/11/07, Geoffrey S. Mendelson <gsm at mendelson.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 11:34:28AM -0700, velociraptor wrote:
> > If someone would just make a decent Torrent client for the Mac or for
> > Linux (e.g. on par w/uTorrent), I'd be happier.  Azureus is a lot
> > better than it used to be but is still relatively piggish and has no
> > schedule-based bandwidth management like uTorrent.
>
>
> I use torrentflux. It's a fancy GUI front end, which runs under Apache.
>
> It does not have schedule based bandwidth, but it does have a scheduler.
>
> You set a maximum number of torrents and it queues the rest.
>
> I prefer to download the things I can from a local mirror. At 3am,
> I get 400k bytes per second, I have never seen more than 160 on a
> torrent.
>
> In my case, longevity and error recovery are far more important than
> speed. I often download things that take as long as 20 days.
>
> Geoff.

I don't know about schedule based, but bandwidth shaping can be added
to torrentflux pretty easily.  There's information in the forums on
how to edit the php script that actually launches the bittorrent
client to get it running with trickle[0].  Unfortunately, from what I
can tell, once you've set limits with trickled you can't adjust the
limits without stopping and restarting the daemon with the new limits.
 I'd also think this would require you to restart any processes you've
launched with trickle, but I haven't tested it so that's just a guess.

There's also tf-b4rt[1], which originally started as a fork of
torrentflux and is now a completely separate program that's currently
in alpha.  Looking around the forums, it looks like someone's come up
with a script[2] that will let you do some schedule based bandwidth
shaping, although not in quite the same way uTorrent/Azureus/etc do
it.  It won't let you set/adjust a global upload/download cap, but you
can change the individual caps on each running torrent.

Really though, from what I'm seeing it looks like the best option for
schedule based bandwidth shaping with torrentflux would be to just use
iptables/pf/etc.



[0]: http://monkey.org/~marius/pages/?page=trickle
[1]: http://tf-b4rt.berlios.de
[2]: http://tf-b4rt.berlios.de/forum/index.php/topic,498.0.html