BitTorrent Seeder Server

Maybe I'm attempting to use BitTorrent in a manner never intended by the creator, but I desperately want a scalable server side solution for seeding torrents. Now, by scalable, I don't mean BitTorrent doesn't scale. By its very nature BitTorrent scales like a mofo adding seeders with each successive download. The administration of seeding a large number of torrents by a single entity does not scale due to the sheer time requirements necessary to prepare a large number of files.

To seed a single file is easy enough. Pick a tracker, configure the torrent using MakeTorrent, upload the torrent to the tracker, click the torrent link and save to the originating folder to seed the file and wait for the torrent to be discovered by interested downloaders. For a few files, this is easy enough. Try it with as few as 10 files and you will begin to understand the tedium. The original plan was to seed a file once and let the free market take over. My guess is, the free market isn't as free with sharing now as it used to be thanks to warning shots fired in the form of RIAA lawsuits.

My PMCMovies.com site is currently seeding 10 torrent files (which will soon be 25). I'm operating two full time seeds so that users will always find at least one available seed (when critical mass is achieved, this may no longer be necessary, I'm just not sure what critical mass is). Unlike the world of shared television programs, I'm attempting to maintain some semblance of 100% uptime.

Further complicating the issue is BitTorrent's insistence on running as the current logged on user. This means if the current user logs out (not shuts down Windows), the app shuts down. Why would I want to log out the current user? A better question is why wouldn't I log out the current user. If I'm taking the time to serve a few dozen video files, I certainly don't want some knucklehead coming along and deleting them because I didn't lock down the system before I stepped away from the console.

I know, all you Linux zealots are chomping at the bit to tell me this doesn't happen in your world. You can have keep your command line interface because the Windows alternative is approximately the same. To get around running as the current user there are two options: employ a registry hack using Windows Resource Kit tools or install an application like FireDaemon which will call the program executable as a service.

Running BitTorrent as a service via FireDaemon works, but it approximates being stuck with a command line interface. Unlike TorrentStorm, which has a great UI (not perfect) for configuring seeding and upload throttling (things a server admin would want), running BitTorrent or any of the variants as a service requires setting command line switches on startup to keep the files seeded. Another downside to this method is the need to manually define a new instance of BitTorrent with appropriate switches for every file being served. Think about that on the scale of a service like Movielink. Literally hundreds of instances of BitTorrent would need to run, if the service was going to make sure seeds were present 24/7 for all available content.

While I don't expect Movielink to need tools like BitTorrent to easily scale their reach to millions of potential users, smaller distributors with as few as 100 movies could certainly benefit. As someone aspiring to be one of those smaller distributors, my wishlist of features for a distributed peer sharing model like BitTorrent is as follows:

Uploading torrent file to tracker automatically posts the torrent in the world accessible Web directory.
A server admin tool operating as a Windows service
Control over uploading and seeding on a per torrent basis
Easy replication of a current configuration if multiple servers are required do to unusual demand for specific files.

I don't think any of these requests is particularly complex, I just don't have the programming background to make them happen.

Posted by Jake

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BitTorrent Seeder Server

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