how to set up a private bittorrent network?]

[prettyprettygood]

I'm trying to send torrents without a local network. I'm relatively new to networking and linux so bear with me.

At the moment, I have created a torrent on one computer, set it as the seed, and sent the torrent file to another computer, so it can download the torrent. As I'm checking the download status on the peer, it shows that nothing is downloading. On the seed computer, I see an error saying "tracker returned error: Tracker gave HTTP response code 0 (no response).

Q: I don't have a tracker set up. Do I need one? When I created the torrent, I simply set the tracker to "http://localhost/announce". If I don't need a tracker, what can I put here?

Q: Do I need to set up port forwarding? I'm not making my torrents available to the outside internet, so it seems like I don't need to.