Torrent

Torrent servers are not intended to be used as a seedbox. Upload is strictly limited, thus you will not be able to develop any reasonable ratio and probably to use private trackers as well.

There are four torrent servers: t1, t2, t3, t4. To create account on one of those servers execute dowhatyouwantcauseapirateisfree command. After few minutes your account will be ready. To log in to the torrent server using SSH keys run ssh tX on the shell server, e.g. ssh t3. If you see a password prompt that means you have to wait a little bit more or report the problem to administrator.

Note

Command dowhatyouwantcauseapirateisfree works only on obsoleted stallman and korn shell servers. It will be ported to stallman2 default shell server soon. You can login to obsoleted server with your current login and password.

Gentleman’s agreement

To make our lives better here are few simple rules:

• Do not share data and access to your account with third parties.
• Do not copy data from torrent server to any other servers, especially web and shell servers.
• Do not download too many torrents at once. There are other users too.

Torrent access will be banned if are not following the rules. You are the one responsible for downloaded data. We do not care if it is Ubuntu ISO or something else. Notice that we treat data on the torrent servers as unimportant. Due to performance reasons, we are using unstable filesystems which are still in development. When crash occurs all your files can disappear.

Directories

In home folder on torrent servers you will find following directories:

.
|-- PASSWORD
`-- rtorrent
    |-- completed
    |-- download
    |-- session
    `-- watch

In PASSWORD file you can find your password to download data using HTTP or SFTP protocol. You cannot change your password beside running dowhatyouwantcauseapirateisfree again. In rtorrent directory you can find:

Directory	Description
completed/	All finished downloads are moved to this directory. Downloading can be easily automated with Rsync, for instance.
download/	Currently downloaded files goes there.
session/	Used to store session files. Sometimes if rTorrent dies unexpectedly you may need to delete .lock file from this directory in order to start rTorrent.
watch/	You can add .torrent files here and they will be added to running rTorrent automatically. Another good option to automate tasks.

Quota

Please do not exceed 20GB of disk space. We are user-friendly and there is no system quota limit. If you want to download 50G that’s OK but do not keep your home folder big forever. Keep it clean and remove files as soon as possible.

We do some periodic cleaning:

• files from /completed folder are removed in 30 days
• files from /download folder are removed in 40 days

Please do not move files from above directories somewhere else because we will get out of space fast.

Using rTorrent

Directory structure is prepared for using rtorrent program. It is recommended to run rTorrent inside the screen to keep rtorrent running after closing the terminal. You can invoke Screen and rTorrent at the same time with following command:

screen -S torrent rtorrent

Command should be executed on torrent server. Now you have screen with rtorrent inside first windows. To create additional window press CTRL+a c. Switching between windows: CTRL+a p for previous window and CTRL+a n for next window.

After logging out and logging in again you can restore Screen with command:

screen -x torrent

For details about Screen see man screen. Key bindings and information about rTorrent you will find in man rtorrent.

Using Aria

You can use Aria as an alternative to rTorrent. It is a simple program yet powerful invoked by:

$ aria2c -T file.torrent

There is no graphical interface as in rTorrent thus you cannot change anything during program operation. As before we recommend running it inside Screen.

Getting files

To get your files to local computer you can use either HTTP or SFTP protocol. The latter uses encrypted connection The latter uses encrypted connection.

HTTP protocol

To connect through HTTP use a web browser and type following URL:

http://tX.rootnode.net/yourlogin

where X is number of the torrent server, e.g. http://t3.rootnode.net/example. You will see directory listing from which you can download files directly. Remember that you must not share access to this page with anyone.

SFTP protocol

To connect through SFTP use yourlogin@tX.rootnode.net and password found in PASSWORD file. You can use any software supporting SFTP protocol like WinSCP for Microsoft Windows and wget, lftp for GNU/Linux. Connection is encrypted.

If the download speed seems to be limited, try to use more connections. Not many programs supports this feature, though.

lftp client

We will describe lftp because it is able to recursively download directories and continue unfinished downloads. It can also open many connections to one file. See manual page for details. Below you will find example commands.

To download whole directory type:

$ lftp -c 'mirror -c http://yourlogin:a43esncj83@t3.rootnode.net/yourlogin/completed/Nice_Directory'

You can also use lftp interactively. This time using SFTP protocol and opening 6 parallel connection:

$ lftp
lftp :~> open -u yourlogin,a43esncj83 sftp://t3.rootnode.net
lftp yourlogin@t3.rootnode.net:~> cd completed
cd ok, cwd=/home/yourlogin/completed
lftp rootnode@t3.rootnode.net:~/completed> pget -n 6 -c ubuntu.iso

To join multiple tasks use semicolon:

$ lftp -c 'get -c sftp://yourlogin:a43esncj83@t3.rootnode.net/completed/file1.img;
           get -c sftp://yourlogin:a43esncj83@t3.rootnode.net/completed/file2.img;
           get -c sftp://yourlogin:a43esncj83@t3.rootnode.net/completed/file3.img'

Troubleshooting

Could not lock session directory

If you see this message, check that there is no other rtorrent process running. Maybe you already have rtorrent screen session, check this with screen –list command. As a last resort kill rtorrent process and remove lock file with commands:

$ pkill -9 rtorrent
$ rm ~/session/rtorrent.lock