Controlling the Peers with uTorrent?

[magkliarn]

Hi guys, I have a question I can't seem to find the answer to anywhere:

Is it possible to control your DL/UL peers down to a single IP-adress? By this I mean, if i download a torrent, am I able to download it from one single peer (that I have decided), and not just have all connections randomly picked out for me (as it usually does)? Same goes for upload.

Thanks a ton for your help =)

[moogly]

No you can't. An empirical solution would be to block all other IPs from the torrent swarm but it's not possible easily for a popular torrent.

A simple solution is to recreate a private torrent (with public tracker announce or embedded tracker) and send the .torrent to this trusted IP by email e.g. and to seed only to it.

[magkliarn]

Thankyou for the fast response, moogly!

I have understood from the FAQ that you are able to block out IP-adresses using the ipfilter, but this doesn't seem like a smart way to go (like you stated in your first sentence) since I then would have to block every port except the one I want to connect to.

I am interested however in your other idea, problem is I don't really know how to do the stuff mentioned. You say:

"A simple solution is to recreate a private torrent (with public tracker announce or embedded tracker) and send the .torrent to this trusted IP by email e.g. and to seed only to it."

Ok, so how do you "recreate a private torrent"? What do you mean? How would this solve my problem? How does it work, theoretically speaking?

Many questions, but it just seemed like a very good way of solving it, hence I'm a bit disappointed that I don't understand very much =P

[Switeck]

If you set net.max_halfopen AND bt.connect_speed BOTH to 0 and stop all torrents, change your listening port, and then restart the torrents you want to seed to only 1 person.

...THEN if you have port forwardeded and not firewalled on the new port, your friend can add your ip:port to their uTorrent (right-click in PEERS window and choose Add Peer...) and they should be able to connect and download from you as well as download from everyone else on the torrent.

Do note you'll need to raise net.max_halfopen and bt.connect_speed back to at least 1 when done...and probably change ports back to what you were using before as well.

This isn't meant to be easy...BitTorrent is meant to share with everyone.

[moogly]

By recreating a new torrent, I mean create a new torrent from your data with private flag (you can add a useless file like *.txt or whatever to change the hash of the original torrent). Then you send this new .torrent to your trusted peer (that implies to know who is that peer).

I did that to download back torrents from my seedbox (with large UL speed) to my local computer and that worked.

[hermanm]

Using ipfilter.dat is the easiest way. You just need two IPs: 1) all possible external IP ranges before the IP you want to allow. Then 2) all possible external IP ranges after the IP you want to allow.

For example, you only want to connect to 66.66.66.66, your two IP entries in ipfilter.dat would be:

3.0.0.0-66.66.66.65

66.66.66.67-222.239.76.168

I don't know the exact starting and ending valid IP ranges for wide area networks (WANs), but the entry above will allow you to do what you want in practice.

This strategy may be usable in a seedbox situation, but its not clear you will be able to utilize full upstream with just your IP.

[moogly]

Yes but I tried with ipfilter.dat and that failed.

In addition with my solution, you can continue to resume your other torrents as usual (i.e. with a full swarm) and just have one or 2 torrents with one peer (your seedbox or your friend).