BitTorrent - Page currently under construction

Configuring your computer and peripherals to play nicely with BitTorrent can be a bit of a hassle. It's definitely worth it though, so persist and help build what is probably the most promising filesharing system.

There are plenty of clients to choose from. There is a varied range of features and footprint. µTorrent is probably one of the better clients around at the moment with DHT implemented and a very small footprint. The footprint of µTorrent is getting larger, but that is due to the implementation of more features rather than pointless bloating. A small list of BitTorrent clients can be found on the favourite software page.

Never pay for any filesharing software. There is always a free alternative.

There is not much configuration required to get started with BitTorrent. The two main settings that should be changed are the port that the client will accept incoming connections on and the maximum upload rate.

This can be any port except for a few that are reserved for common internet traffic. If you select ports in the 50,000 - 65,536 region you have to be quite unlucky to have a problem. The location of this setting will vary between clients.

In µTorrent, the setting can be found using: Ctrl-P → Network → “Port Used for Incoming Connections”.

To ensure that your connection doesn't get choked and you cannot send confirmation packets, ensure that your upload is limited to approximately 80% of your total upload capacity. A connection with a 256Kbps (32KBps) upload rate should therefore be limited to approximately 25Kbps.

uTorrent also runs well under wine in the linux environment. The only tip is to set the screen update interval to > 2 seconds as it tends to strobe a little in the wine applet.

To configure your router to pass the incoming connections to your computer, you will need to first log in to your router. Once you are in the router configuration, you will need to find “Port Forwarding”. There you will need to enter the port you have chosen in your client, and the local IP of your machine not the public IP. To discover your local IP, press Windows-R → Type CMD and press enter → type ipconfig at the command prompt. Your IP will be printed on the screen.

In µTorrent, the setting can be found using: Ctrl-P → Network → “Bandwidth Limiting”.

Some software manufacturers, like OpenOffice.org have .torrent files for their software posted on their servers. Other things will require a specialised search-engine. IsoHunt and TorrentSpy are quite comprehensive. Make sure that the Torrent you want to download has many Seeders and Peers. Seeders are users who have the entire torrent and are sharing the entire thing. Peers are yet to complete the download and are only sharing what they have already downloaded.

Download the .torrent that you are after, saving it in a place that you'll find it again. X:\Downloads\.torrents\incomplete works well. (You can configure µTorrent (and probably most other clients) to move the .torrent file to another directory when the download is complete.)

Open the .torrent in your client of choice.

It takes a while for Torrents to get moving. There is quite a bit of handshaking and sniffing of bums that needs to be done before BitTorrent will start moving. Once it's going, though, it's not uncommon to completely max out most connections.

Like with all filesharing, there will be people who do not play fair. For the system to work, the your uploads should match your downloads. There are also people who distribute virus riddled torrents. Practise safe-hex.