Totally new please help (questions about torrents & p2p)
 

I have several questions.
Somebody please explain what is a torrent
Can I use more than one program for exsample Lime wire and shareza?
Which of the programms are the best with the most results? Do they all charge per song?
Sorry for so many questions, I just like music and ringtones for my phone . Thanks for any responds

1. A torrent is a file you can open. It contains information needed for a compatible software to get a download over the Internet from other BitTorrent clients.
2. Yes you can, but this is not recommended, as it won't give you more performance in most cases (if 2 of these programs are using the same network). if you wish to get access to more networks, use a multi-network client. (For example: Shareaza)
3. No. All good programs are completely free. But using them might be illegal under certain circumstances in your country.

More information:
BitTorrent - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Shareaza - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Greetings,
Old

thank you for the help
 

Thanks the info made things more clear.:super:

nim,
Here's a great tutorial on torrents:
Beginners Guide

The best torrent clients are Vuze, (what I use), or uTorrent. Don't bother using LW for torrents. You won't get nearly as many results, LW limits the number of torrents it can dl, and LW is banned from some torrent sites for not complying with protocols.

thank you for the help
 

Thanks for the guide and the site advice.:idea:

Before you start randomly downloading Torrents try and read as much about them. There are several programs you can download that in combination with the Client you pick will increase your productivity.

If you plan to use torrenting for illegal purposes, there is a chance that you can be caught if you do not take the right precautions. Peer Guardian 2 is a great way to protect yourself against people looking to catch you in the act. I generally focus on Music and I have about 100GB currently available to stream I use a VPN but that’s really not necessary. I got a computer removed and a fine a few years ago and though I might as well pay some extra cash as I’m already running a T1 I don’t see a point in being disturbed. Although I’m In Canada and it’s pretty much just a slap on the wrists so make sure you know your federal law.

I tend to limit the bandwidth on other running seeds in order to force bandwidth onto that one. The more complete copies there are in circulation, the more seeders there should also be, thereby speeding up everyone else’s downloads

When creating your torrent, by default it will be set up to "automatcially" set the size of chunks... I believe this is true of all such utilities. I advise - after reading enough help files - to set it to something like 512 kB. This does three things: first, it results in a lot less "lost" or "wasted" data. If I were to attempt to download your torrent and your chunk size was 4 MB and there was any sort of error or connection issue, I'd have to start downloading that 4 MB all over again. This is rather bothersome if I already had 3.98 MB before having to do that. Secondly, smaller chunks will save bandwidth on your end and on the client end while your program of choice will be able to more accurately depict your share ratio. Thirdly... for aesthetics alone... progress indicators will update more quickly

Peer Guardian 2
 

Dear Forum Members

I would just like to point out something that may be unknown to new Peer Guardian users and that is it's default block lists, i.e. the five block lists that are installed along with the application, are useless/empty and do not work, and so initially you will have no protection.

New users will now have to download and/or create and install their own block lists (from here: I-BlockList | IP Block Lists) before using Peer Guardian.

However, please note that creating a block list is very easy when downloaded from the I-BlockList website.



UK Bob

very good point UKB, and one which I pointed out in a post a few days ago..actually I wasn't aware that the current installers for PG2 don't have a modified update list included, but I certainly am aware that my old install of PG2 won't update and I had to enter in the lists to PG2 via the following method:

List Manager>Add>enter in the appropriate list from the website given in the above post

While I'm sure your intentions are in the right place here, you should surely take into account what else small piece sizes do to big torrents. First off the torrent file will be huge. Second, while yes if you are interrupted while downloading a piece you will most likely lose that data, lets do a little math having e.g.

A 8.53GB torrent. In my case I lost 55.18MB while downloading it. It was piece size of 2MB = 4366 pieces. Protocol on a bigger piece torrent will generally use around 0.3% (messages back and forth between clients, which depend on a lot of things) approx. 26.2MB

You want 512KB pieces i.e. 17464 pieces. Well that means 4 times as many messages. So 26.2MB x 4 = 104.8MB so 78.6MB more than with 2MB piece size.

Now let's go back to the beginning where I said I lost 55.18MB. Let's say you lose 4 times less with 512KB pieces, so 13.8MB.

512KB pieces = 104.8MB + 13.8MB = 118.6MB waste
2MB pieces = 26.2MB + 55.18MB = 81.4MB waste

IMHO the uploader should have made the torrent 4MB pieces as around 2000 pieces works quite well when minimizing wasted data. But you probably use some bad client like Limewire, so you can't see all the overhead used on small sizes.

Sorry Peerless

I did not see your earlier post, however I only found out about Peer Guardian's non working default lists a few days ago when I re-installed it. I did a bit of digging and found out that Phoenix Labs had given up on maintaining or supplying any further block lists with PG2.

As Peer Guardian 2 is an essential piece of software that is often recommended by this forum, it occurred to me that most novices, upon installing PG2, would not know that they were unprotected. Therefore, I thought a "precautionary posting" was in order.



UK Bob