Torrents: real Newbie question
 

Have used "Transmission" bittorrent client for a while and downloaded files successfully.

Cannot find any information in documentation or on the web about actually creating your own torrent files to seed for other people.

I stumbled upon Torrent/New... in the menus, but as well as the folder or filename of what I want to create a torrent of, it requires the URL of a "tracker site". Where do I find a list of these to use? From the torrents I have downloaded, things like http://www.piratebay.org keep cropping up. Is this the kind of URL I should use?

If anyone can refer me to any Transmission information on the web covering this issue, I would be grateful. There seems to be some information, but none covering this point.

Steve

Transmission - http://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki

I'm sorry, but there is no information at that link to help me. There seems plenty of information on downloading - but none on sharing files that I already have.

It should not be hard to learn How to Create a Torrent in general and maybe reading one or two transmissionbt forum threads could help. (There's also the Beehive trackerlist if you need more tracker suggestions.)

Well, I have followed the instructions on the link you gave (http://forum.transmissionbt.com/view...t=7921&p=38115), but I still cannot figure out how to get it to work.

I was not aware I needed to "register" the torrent with a site (in my case, www.mininova.org). According to the info on that link you gave, I get the URL from the site *before* creating the torrent.

It's amazing - when I had finished downloading the files I obtained from a torrent site, I was officially seeding and people were downloading from me all the time. Now I have moved the files to a different location on the computer, no one can get to them! I am presuming this is because I need to create a brand new torrent pointing to them (cannot understand why - surely an existing torrent file could just use the files I have downloaded, regardless of where I had put them on my system?)

There does appear to be, on this mininova site, three "example" URLs at the top. Do I just use one of those? I did use one of those (http://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce) in my Torrent when I created it.

I filled in all the details and uploaded the torrent file to the site. But what happens next? Do I not have to also "load" the torrent back into Transmission before people can start downloading from me? Or does this automatically happen as soon as someone somewhere in the world chooses to download that particular file (and I am online at the time, AND with Transmission loaded...)? When I clicked on "Add" and put my own torrent file back in, it started trying to download it again, rather than seeding it!

Sorry to be such a "demanding" poster, but if Transmission had better "get started" documentation, I would not have to ask anyone else! It seems to give plenty of help for "leechers", but none at all for "seeders"!

Steve

Odd isn't it? ;-p If they're in another location but still unchanged (renamed, remuxed, whatever else) then symlinking them to the location the torrent expects them in could work.

I did try to create a symlink to where the torrent originally was - but does symlinking work with whole directories, or do you have to symlink each individual file?

For instance, say all the torrented files are in a folder called "myFiles", which originally was on my desktop. I have now moved it to a different location. I did do:

cd Desktop
ln -s myFiles "/media/System/Content of 10Gb Drive/Videos/myFiles"

which should have created a symlink folder called myFiles on my Desktop. It didn't. Are there different options for copying directories? I did do ln --help but got thoroughly confused! Some comments in there seem to indicate that symlinking to a directory is not possible, or at the very least flaky.

Steve

Hmm. I appear to have managed it. Or something.

What I did was search the internet for the original torrent of the files I downloaded (which I didn't have anymore). Then I clicked to download that torrent/the files again, as if I didn't have them already. Transmission sprung into action and asked me where I wanted to save the files that I was about to download. I gave it the new location into which I had *already saved* the completed files. It started measuring how much of the files I had already downloaded, and not surprisingly it eventually figured out I had downloaded 100%. So it added it to my list of torrents in Transmission; but this time it said "Seeding to X of X connected peers". And it is indeed uploading to some users.

So I guess this is how you can move your downloaded files elsewhere on your system, and still be able to seed the file(s) to connected users.

Thank you for your earlier advice. If I ever figure out whether my way is the proper way to do things with Transmission, I might contact them and offer to write a revised section for the Transmission manual. All this kind of thing really should be covered under the Getting Started With Torrents section...

Steve