How to create a torrent without tracker on transmission?

Discussion of Transmission that doesn't fit in the other categories
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giyadh
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Apr 19, 2019 11:16 pm

How to create a torrent without tracker on transmission?

Post by giyadh »

Hello,

I'm trying to create a torrent without a tracker. I just want to send a video to a friend of mine but I can't get it working. I've created a torrent (with nothing in the tracker field and set the torrent to public, private is unchecked), and I sent myself the file to test on another computer. I can't get it to work. I've opened my port, when I run the test it says open on both my laptop and desktop. I've got a static IP on the desktop which is where the torrent was created and is being shared, and I emailed it to myself. Im running transmission on both, but one is Windows and one is Mac.

Any ideas why I can't get it to work? DHT is enabled on both.

Sorry in advance, I can't find anything in my search on this forum that helps. If someone can point me to a topic that would help that would be appreciated as well.
onglestuilles
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Jul 08, 2020 6:57 pm

Re: How to create a torrent without tracker on transmission?

Post by onglestuilles »

Hi @giyadh. Did you ever figure this out?

I have the same question. I want to use a torrent to backup some large game assets amongst some friends.

I found some old threads that all seem to imply you cannot make a trackerless torrent:

From this old thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=14644
rb07 wrote: Tue Apr 02, 2013 4:01 pm Easy:
  1. Create a new torrent with your file(s), mark it as private.
  2. Use a public tracker (which also goes into the creation in the previous point).
  3. Send the .torrent file to your friend using email.
  4. Start seeding.
The public tracker will help with finding the IP address you're seeding from, but since the torrent is private, and nobody else has the .torrent file then only your friend can download. Private means (at least in Transmission) that DHT and PEX will be disabled for the torrent, that means using a magnet, hash, or any other means to get your torrent will not work; only those who have the .torrent can download it.
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=19976 repeats that advice
verifylocaldata wrote: Tue Feb 04, 2020 10:50 pm you actually need to use a real tracker not an example...
this usually means uploading a registering the torrent on a public site
or you can host your own tracker locally either using a client with an embedded tracker or using opentracker
also one of you will need to have port forwarding working in order for a connection to be established
Apparently uTorrent has a built-in tracker: hxxps://bootstrike.com/Articles/CreateTorrent/, which is sort of "trackerless". I don't know for sure but I doubt Transmission has such a thing.

But I suppose that advice is all from the pre-trackerless (pre-DHT) days. I want to do what I think you want: avoid trackers entirely, and just use the DHT. hxxps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Creating_and_publishing_torrents, hxxps://torrentfreak.com/common-bittorrent-dht-myths-091024/ and hxxps://www.quora.com/Can-you-share-a-file-via- ... -a-tracker make it sound like this should be possible but I have the same issue you do: my nodes don't find out about each other?

Does a torrent need to be bootstrapped on a tracker in order for it to end up in the DHT? Or do I just need to wait much longer for the DHT to upload the .torrent file?
onglestuilles
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Jul 08, 2020 6:57 pm

Re: How to create a torrent without tracker on transmission?

Post by onglestuilles »

Hey @noblegil, what did you get? Could you share your understanding?

I am still confused about how to do this. If you could share your experiments it would help me and help everyone else too :)
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