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DHT vs Private tracker


dmeet

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Hi, everyone. We have a small subnet and I installed some tracker engine for transfering files. The point is that we want to use some ratio system so we distribute only private torrents. But I founded one strange thing: once I downloaded torrent file, added it to my uTorrent client. Tracker said: 0 seeders, 0 peers. But then some peers came from somewhere (remember - torrent was private, so DHT and PEX was disabled) and I downloaded target file successfully. It was really strange... Later I found an article about how DHT works. There was information about bootstrap servers on router.utorrent.com and router.bittorrent.com, and I understood that I got my "strange" peers by DHT.

But what if I want to set limit of peers relative to uesr's ratio? And how private trackers with such ratio systems exist if everyone still can download private torrent using DHT? Where is the solution?

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Yes. It seems I missed something... I found many questions such as mine, but I can't find any comprehensive answers.

All theese peers had "I" flag. Thus those connections were incoming. Does it mean that it is normal situation: when I use secure (private) torrent, client allow to connect incoming peers? Can I do something with it?

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Ok... Thanks for the explanation.

But... I registered on a one of the largest russian tracker torrents.ru and tried to test private torrents here. The result is that I can't download private torrents if I have no peers from tracker (i.e. using DHT only) . Why? There are a lot of users here, much more than in out net.

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µTorrent (or any other BitTorrent client) has incoming and outgoing connections.

Outgoing connections can only be made to peers µtorrent found via the tracker, PEX, DHT or LPD.

The private flag disables PEX, DHT and LPD which leaves only the tracker. The private flag is intended for private trackers who keep statistics (usually to enforce some sharing policy).

Incoming connections however can come basically from anyone*. The other peer could have found you through PEX, DHT, LPD, the tracker or he might have manually added your IP**.

On a torrent with the Private flag on however the only way*** the incoming peer could have gotten your IP was by loading the original .torrent and asking the tracker for peers.

* There is no way to verify if incoming connections on a private torrent found you via the tracker or not. So all the BitTorrent clients accept any incoming connection even with the private flag on.

** In µTorrent this is done with "Add Peer" in the context menu of the peers tab of a specific torrent, he would still have to load the .torrent file to get the unique info-hash though.

*** That is if the client the other peer is using isn't a malicious one that ignores the private flag.

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