Nothing nefarious. My alma mater had its Midnight Madness and televised it. Apparently the school gave permission to a torrent site to distribute it.
I must see it.
I got BitTornado (somehow it was recommended to me) and set it up. Tried to download some stuff but nothing happens that I can see. (A 240K wallpaper downloaded all right, so now I’m trying a 30M thing.)
Maybe not set up right? Maybe firewall problems? How do I restart if I have to power down? DSL, so always connected.
I have no clue.
Maybe someone could recommend some totally legit, not so big, things I could practice on?
The principle of a torrent for file sharing is that as the file propigates to many machines, anyone else who wants to download it has that many possible machines to download it from. So for instance (assuming that everyone had the same download and upload speeds AND that your upload speed was slower than your download, which is typical with most internet plans) if you had a file to share on a torrent, the first person to download it from you would get it at 1X the regular upload speed. The third person to download it would be able to download pieces of it from both you, and the second person. So they would get it at 2X regular upload speed. The fourth person to download it would get it downloaded at 3X the regular upload speed–because there are three people do upload it from. And so on.
…From the standpoint of an individual downloader (that is, YOU) as more people have more pieces that you don’t have, you have more and more possible sources to download pieces you need from–until the download speed you get is limited not by any one person’s upload speed, but by your own download speed. Of course the network sharing programs impose some limitations on connectivity–often the programs are set up to allow you to connect to no more than a dozen or so other people. If the people you are connected to don’t have any of the file pieces you need, then the program goes looking for others that do.
I am familiar with Azureus but not the one you are using. In Azureus, you have to begin the torrent, and then go to the individual tab for that download and your download and upload speeds both default to zero. Try setting both of them to some number, such as 20K/sec or whatever. And then wait a couple minutes; Azureus tends to take a few tries before it connects to a group. It starts off slow (downloading from only 1 or 2 others) but gets connects to more people after 15-30 minutes.
~
The bf uses BitTornado, but I found that I prefer regular BitTorrent myself. Just Google BitTorrent and download the program off the official BitTorrent site.
BitTornado has some bells and whistles that I found I didn’t use. The basic program just lets you download the files and has the least options. I’ve also accidentally forgot I was downloading a torrent file and just tried to “save as” but you actually need to click on the file, then select “open with BitTorrent/Tornado” and then it will ask where you want to save it from within the program, and begin downloading. That’s probably not what’s wrong, but I’ve done it a couple of times when I hadn’t downloaded anything in a while, so I thought it worth mentioning.
You don’t have to change those numbers. Zero means “unlimited”. You only need to change them if you want to limit the speed of a particular torrent.
For example, say your total available upload speed is 32 KB/sec, and you want to download two files, but one of them is more urgent than the other. You could limit the less urgent one’s upload speed to 8 KB/sec, leaving 24 KB/sec for the more urgent one… and since your download speed usually depends on your upload speed, that one will download faster too.
Also, larger torrents usually take longer to get up to speed, because the individual parts are larger. You can’t start sharing until you have at least one complete part, and if you aren’t sharing, the other clients won’t give you much of their attention, because you don’t have anything they want.
I have found that Bit Tornado does not have a particularly intuitive interface. You download and install it and it just kind of goes away. If you start the program from the link it leaves in your Start menu, you have to decipher where the torrent is and picking out one torrent on a busy tracker is a pain in the ass.
The easy way to go is to save the .torrent file. Just download it like any other file; make sure not to click “open”. This way if your connection gets cut off you don’t have to find the torrent again in order to resume because you have all the info you need sitting right there. With BitTornado you’ll end up with a little file icon with “BT” on it. Double click this icon and the torrent should start automatically. You have to choose where to save the file but once you do it will start downloading almost immediately assuming the torrent is well-seeded (as in lots of sources). If it is well-seeded it will keep climbing in speed until you have no more download bandwidth and stay there until it’s finished.
Note that if you max out your upload speed, your download speed will suffer. Uploading is encouraged and it’s considered polite to upload at least as much as you download but if your upload is maxxed out you won’t be able to download as fast. So make sure to set your maximum upload speed to a little less than you know it to be. In my case I can upload at about 55kb/sec but I set it to 40kb/sec.
Also note that the latest version of BitTornado gets stuck in the task manager after you close it. You’ll probably have to ctrl-alt-delete after you’re finished and manually end process on it. Otherwise it sits in your RAM eating memory and not actually doing anything.