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Bittorrent howto

tata's picture
Submitted by tata on Mon, 2006-09-18 18:41.

If you've had no experience with BitTorrent filesharing whatsoever, there's a couple of things for you to do:

1. Get a client and install it

We advise you to use the BitComet or the Azureus client. There are, however, numerous other clients around. It's a matter of taste, basically. You might need to restart your system after this step.

*on gentoo:

echo "net-p2p/azureus ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

echo "dev-java/swt ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

emerge -p azureus

2. Click on the torrent link

On our site, click the torrent link of the file you want to download on our site. Your browser will download a small .torrent file, which contains only metadata that the client you just installed needs for downloading (connecting to peers etc.); that's why it's only a few KBs in size.

3. Let the client download the file

Download speed may vary, depending on how many peers there are at a given moment. When a torrent has only just started out, or in general when there are little peers, the rate may suck. So hang in there! If you don't get a connection at all (error messages in the client), try switching off your firewall, and start the torrent again. If it works then, open local ports 6881-6999 and port 6969 on your firewall and switch it on again. Those are needed for communication with the tracker. Turn to Brian's BitTorrent FAQ & Guide if that doesn't help. Also, you can post your problem in our BitTorrent Help - Forum

4. Keep the torrent open after the download has completed and upload at least until your upload/download ratio has reached 100%. If you're a nice fellow and you can spare some bandwidth, keep it open beyond that point. This will help keeping the torrents alive.

For more information, and for those rare cases where the above instructions do not suffice your needs, turn to our BitTorrent Help - Forum and/or Brian's BitTorrent FAQ & Guide

If you've read the sticky ('How to download Files with BitTorrent), but still can't get BitTorrent downloads to work, don't hestitate to post your questions here. For some reason people seem to prefer using our e-mail address to mail in their questions instead. It's more effective to do this in the forum, as other more people can benefit from our replies.

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