Three Easy Steps To Create Your Own Private Tracker

October 18, 2012 by
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Digital Media, Mobile Phones, P2P technology, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services 

If you don’t fancy all those public trackers, or have a hard time getting invited to private ones, why not create your own? This article is going to teach you exactly that; you’re three steps away from having one. Enjoy!

First of all, let’s list some of the advantages that come with owning your own file-sharing haven. Taking into consideration that you already have a decent groups of friends, each having their own collection(s) of movies, games, music and whatnot, the benefits of creating a private tracker are pretty obvious: you get to invite only the people you trust, there are considerably less chances to get infected with dangerous viruses, increased privacy, easy sharing at any time, etc. With that said, let’s start with…

Setting Up A Torrent Client

Before all, you will need a torrent client which supports embedded trackers. Such a client is uTorrent for Windows, but you can also opt for Vuze of OS X, or qBitTorrent for Linux. Once you’ve made your choice, here’s what you have to do:

- Go to uTorrent Options>Advanced. There you will notice a “bt.enable_tracker” option that you need to set it as “True” by double-clicking on it.

- Restart your client to save the changes

- Run your client once again, and go to Options>Connection. Write down your listening port, and be sure that “Randomize Port Each Start’ is unchecked.

- Then go to Options/Advanced>Web UI. If you choose not to use Web UI to remotely monitor torrents, be sure that “Alternative Listening Port” is unchecked.

Note:  Even with “Enable Web UI” unchecked, “Alternative Listening Port” box must also be unchecked in order to avoid issues with the tracker.

If you decide to use Web UI, take note of the “Alternative Listening Port” instead of the port found in the Connection tab.

- Last thing to do is take the port (either the Alternative Listening Port or the one found in the Connection tab) and set it up with your router. Learn how here.

For Vuze and qBitTorrent clients, click on the provided links.

Now, once you’ve completed these steps, you need to handle connectivity…

How To Set Up DynDNS

You PC is now configured to act as a private BitTorrent client, but your friends still need to connect to it via your IP address, and if that IP address is not static, there could be a problem. Fret not, because there’s a simple solution to it. The easiest way is to set up a service like DynDNS or No IP. A guide to help you with that can be found here.

After setting everything up, write down your domain name. You’ll be needing it.

Last step is to…

Create Torrents And Share Them

- Go to File>Create New Torrent – then select the file(s) or folder(s) you want to share.

- In the “Trackers” box you need to insert the following two lines:

http://my.dynamic-dns-hostname.com:60457/announce

http://localhost:60457/announce

Replace the port number accordingly, and also the my.dynamic-dns-hostname.com with your own.

- Make sure that the following options are checked: Start Seeding, Preserve File Order, and Private Torrent.

- Click “Create and Save As” and save your torrent file. You can send that .torrent file to your friends.

Another way to share is to create a Dropbox folder where you can drag-and-drop everything you see fit sharing.

Last but not least, in order to avoid being spotted by your ISP, thus having your bandwidth throttled, enable encryption or use proxies/VPNs. However, if you keep the tracker only for your friends and family, there should be no such issues.

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