New torrents on old Tiger Mac

[jowie]

Hi there,

I've got an old G4 I use as a torrent server (it does the trick!) and so I utilise Transmission 1.54 on it... On the most part it works great. I love Transmission because it's nice and lightweight (unlike Azureus).

I noticed recently that many torrents I add are beginning to not work properly... They don't even start downloading, even though the older torrents are still working fine. I then discovered that if I try running them on my Snow Leopard machine with the latest version of Transmission, they download and seed fine. I have noticed that these torrents show up slightly differently too. On the old Tiger Mac the file size is smaller, and the size of the pieces show up as 2.00 MB rather than 2.10 MB (hence I guess the smaller size). So I'm guessing that these torrents have been created by a newer piece of software that supports irregularly sized pieces, and that Transmission 1.54 doesn't support this?

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that you *may* be still supporting Tiger... I'd hate to think that over something as simple as this, I'll have to chuck away my old trusty G4 torrent server (it's too old to be upgraded to Leopard)...

Thanks!

:-Joe

[jowie]

Ahhh...

It suddenly occurred to me that what I just suggested as a reason is probably only because the older OS works in MiB (power-2) and not MB (power-10)... Hence the different looking file sizes?

it which case, I'm stumped!

[Rolcol]

Do you have any other problems besides speed issues and the base change then? 1.54 is really old and doesn't have DHT, so it is limited to a smaller group of peers. That's probably the reason of your slowness. Newer versions of Transmission have LPD, DHT, and even multi-tracker announce. G4s are obsolete... I guess you're stuck like that unless you can find 2.13 transmission-daemon compiled to run on 10.4...

[jowie]

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestions, but it's not to do with slow speed... Some torrents just won't download *anything*. They don't show any errors, they just won't connect to any peers. Other torrents work just fine.

I've been using this G4 running an old version of Transmission for a couple of years now without any problems. This has only just started appearing in the last couple of weeks, which makes me wonder if it's because newer torrents are produced in a new way that's incompatible with older versions of Transmission...?

If I run the 'offending' torrents on a machine running 2.13, they run fine. Are there any daemons that run any of the v2 builds on Tiger by any chance then? I know the G4 is obsolete, but it was good enough and fast enough to run as a torrent server overnight without using up lots of power. I could run it on a faster machine, but it would cost about 10 times more to run unless I get a Mac mini, which I can't afford

[jowie]

Thanks... Unfortunately I just had a look and the torrents in question are Public... Is it still worth trying an older version?

[jch]

Jowie is probably using a torrent that points at a dead tracker (rhymes with hay), or one that outlaws UDP. Modern versions of Transmission will work around the issue using the DHT, older versions won't.

Jowie, I don't want to sound like a zealot, but a G4 makes a very nice Linux machine.

--jch

[jowie]

Jowie, I don't want to sound like a zealot, but a G4 makes a very nice Linux machine.

Haha thanks, well maybe that's the way to go...

I've got an old G4 that I've been using purely as a torrent server, and I've now also inherited a Power Mac G5 that no longer supports my trusty lovely ADC Studio Display... Looks like I'm going to have to spend a bit of time and money sorting out my old-skool hardware!

[jowie]

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=11111#p51709

Oooh that looks interesting, thanks!

Although... The previous case was an 800 MHz G4, my old torrent Mac is only 400 MHz (or maybe 450, I'm not sure)... Is Leopard going to bring it to its knees?

[jowie]

Check out the documentation on the leopardassist site.

I had a good hunt around on the site, but couldn't find any documentation unfortunately.