Ask HN: For torrent users, what's your setup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: For torrent users, what's your setup?

18 pointsCoreSet19 comments

Full disclosure: I've been pretty lazy when it comes to setting up an efficient, anonymous, and performant torrent system. I played with a raspberry pi seedbox a few months ago, but didn't find much use for it, so I've been doing the lazy thing and going to TPB directly.

Now that it's down, I'd like to switch horses and put more effort into a system that accomplishes those three goals.

So pirates of the HN seas, I ask you: how do you download torrents? What programs/sites/VPNs/etc. do you use and why?

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In my experience, the best thing you can do to keep yourself safe is use private trackers. With these you're extremely unlikely to get a DMCA request/ISP notice. You also get higher quality torrents that are uploaded in a more timely manner and seeded better. One downside is that you have to seed, but I have seeded constantly for years from multiple ISPs and have had no issues ever.

I'm gradually transitioning away from a desktop based setup to a raspi based one. I'm planning on using deluge/transmission, as many others in this thread have mentioned. I'm going to setup a webUI so that adding torrents is stupidly easy. The raspi will also function as a network share, so anyone on my network can stream/drop content. I was also considering writing a command line tool to grab torrents from private trackers and add them to the seedbox, so that I could share my account on those trackers with the people I live with. This is technically against the rules of private trackers, but I don't think there would be any way to tell that I was using this for multiple users.

With this setup, I might end up running all of my traffic through a VPN, as my current ISP shapes torrent traffic, so I could probably get better seeds setting up a VPN on Digital Ocean or some other cloud/VPN provider.

Could you recommend any private tracking communities to investigate? I've heard about what.cd, but not many others.

http://i.imgur.com/X54mWAF.png It's a flow chart starting with what you want.

I rent a dedicated server from Kimsufi. 16 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage. I think it costs me $25-$30 USD a month.

I threw Ubuntu on it and then setup rtorrent, rutorrent, and Apache HTTP Server.

I only use private trackers like what.cd.

I'm still trying to determine the best way to transfer the data from the server to my media box. At this point I use lftp with sftp which is working out well, but I want to set up an automated system.

Interesting. What's your experience with what.cd and private trackers in terms of the usual file-sharing metrics (seeder/leecher ratios, upload rates, prevalence of malware, media coverage, etc.) How do it and others compare to public trackers?

Also, I hope you don't mind me asking (not fishing for an invite) but: How did you secure an invite to what.cd? Did you by any chance do the interview?

Ratios:

It depends on the private tracker. The key is to reciprocate - I initially did poorly on what.cd and had my downloading privileges revoked. I got on Bandcamp and found free albums and just started uploading FLAC content. Now I'm a power user with a nice buffer.

I had better initial experiences on other private trackers but I prefer what.cd's ratio system.

Upload Rates:

what.cd is pretty good about this. I have yet to find something I wanted that didn't have someone seeding. Other private trackers I frequent aren't as good about this.

Prevalence of Malware:

I run Linux systems and primarily download music from private trackers. I get other media over Usenet. So I haven't really had any issues with malware.

Media Coverage:

I'm not exactly sure what you mean.

Invite to what.cd:

I did the interview.

I'm using a Raspberry PI with transmission to handle my torrents.

I can go to the web page and just paste the magnet URL and it just downloads it for me.

I also have flexget running from time to time which checks if there are any new episodes of TV Shows I'm following and automatically downloads that for me and places them in the correct folders after downloading.

I was mostly inspired by this tutorial (http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=47084) but I've made some changes along the way.

I can publish my flexget config if you want to take a look, I believe I had to make some changes in it after an update. I'm also not using the Trakt.tv functionality. I find it easier to just edit the config file than to sign up for a website and create a bunch of lists and whatnot.

I'd love to see the config, if possible. I did a similar tutorial with transmission that didn't have the auto-update features of flexget, but it'd be interesting to give it a shot.

Here you go: https://gist.github.com/ruigomeseu/b9b55a71bc08bccc29d6

Thanks!

I have the same setup with Deluge and minidlna. Dump a magnet link and the torrent is downloaded and moved to the DLNA library directory for easy access. I watch most non-Netflix shows like this.

An added bonus is the ability to schedule downloads for 2AM-8AM only, when I have unlimited bandwidth.

One tip to save a bit of time: Most browsers have plugins that let you automatically send a magnet link to your remote transmission daemon when clicked on (the chrome plugin also shows your transmission activity in a popover).

Thanks mcrider. Cool tip! I didn't know to look for plugins.

I've heard good things about what.cd from people who actually pirate material. (I, myself, only used Torrents when I couldn't get material I purchased legally to play/stream on my Linux laptop.)

I pay $6 a month for a seedbox from seed.st. That way no torrent traffic goes through my pipes. Any files I download can be transferred to my machine from the seedbox using secure ftp.

Is there a community of people setting up their own seed boxes through cloud servers?

> That way no torrent traffic goes through my pipes.

Pipes you control are pipes you control, whether they're in a data center or in your home. You can't avoid a counterfeiting arrest by printing the bills at OfficeMax then mailing them to yourself in a security envelope. Hopefully you're only referring to network quality benefits.

I think the idea was that you're only connecting to your server, rather than a variety of peers on the torrent (which may include studio reps). Also, ISPs are probably more likely to look for illicit activity on the BT protocol rather than SFTP.

Of course it's still illegal and still traceable but assuming the seedbox provider doesn't keep logs on who is transferring what, the risk should be a fair bit less than torrenting it via your own client on your own network.

I like the concept but two things:

1) I don't want to give them my CC info or even my address. They will get busted at some stage and I don't want any association.

2) They will get busted at some stage and you'll lose your facility.

Seems like the type of service paying with Bitcoin was designed for. I am no Bitcoin fan, but that is exactly where I'd want to do anonymous payment.

That whole business model is just asking for trouble. They aren't even pretending to be legit (e.g. a lot of micro-server companies).

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