I currently run the OpenBSD torrent tracker at http://openbsd.somedomain.net as well as the primary seeder but due to external circumstances I am no longer able to continue hosting it.
I am looking for someone interested and able to take this over. I am more than happy to help with administration of the tracker and seeding, but can no longer host it. The best candidate would be someone who already has a local OpenBSD mirror because this requires just a few things more than having a mirror. Below is described what I am using, but can also help set up a different system. * Running the tracker. It is currently a PHPBTTracker which requires PHP and MySQL, it does use mod_rewrite to do some pretty urls but that is not required. There may be better tracker software out now, but I've used this one since 2005 and it seems to work fine. It isn't currently on the same machine as the seeder and could really be anywhere. I can point openbsd.somedomain.net at a new address or you can use a new url and I can set up a redirect. * Creating the torrents. I have a collection of perl and shell scripts that create the torrents. Just pass a directory containing the files to be seeded and they will generate a torrent, compare it the existing torrent and if it is different, add it to the tracker and update the seeding client. There is another script that monitors the mirror log and when the mirror process switches to another directory regenerates the torrent. * Seeding the torrents. I am currently using Transmission for seeding, I was using the official Python BitTorrent client, but it was too much of a hog. The script above takes care of adding and removing torrents. So far Transmission seems to work well. * Changing version numbers for current and previous releases every 6 months. (This is the only manual step) If you already have a mirror you probably don't need to do this. I don't have a specific time frame when the transition needs to be complete, but I was hoping to have it done already. If I can't find a replacement soon, this service will have to go away, and the list will again be inundated with "why aren't there torrents" questions every 6 months. Let me know if you are interested and if so we can start working out the details. l8rZ, -- andrew - http://afresh1.com Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow.
