I'm planning to offer a detailed examination of what exactly goes into the technical end of a BitTorrent tracker by offering explanations as I write my own, but that's well beyond my time allotment for the evening. Instead, I'll write a simple summary of the protocol.
The peer-to-peer aspect is not important for our purposes. Unless you're planning on writing a client, which is well outside the scope of this site, you don't even need to think about it. I know I don't. I really haven't taken the time to study it in much detail, aside from understanding what's going on in general terms.
Happily, the peer-to-tracker protocol is very simple to understand. The tracker is inherently passive, never initiating connections itself. Instead, clients connect to the tracker via HTTP. They provide the infohash (unique identifier) for the torrent they're trying to download, their current port, and a bunch of other information indicating the state of the client. The tracker responds with a simple list of IP addresses that are also downloading the same file. It's up to the client to initiate connections with the provided peers. Since the protocol is peer-to-peer, any client can initiate the connection, assuming that the other computer is properly configured to accept incoming connections.
That's all a tracker has to do: log the IP addresses that connect, and respond with a list of suggestions for possible peers. The process is fast, light on resources, and very easy to code. You can develop a tracker just like any website, using just about any language you want: PHP, ASP, Ruby, whatever. The biggest trackers run on C or other such languages, since it's fast and lightweight beyond the dreams of PHP. However, for your purposes, web languages are all you need.
That said, I'll pick up on the subject later on when I actually find the time to get going on development. Like I say, things have been nuts of late.
2 comments:
Many sites use UDP & HTTP. (Pirate Bay, H33T)
That's true, but UDP is not yet an accepted part of the protocol. While it may be used by some trackers and supported by some clients, UDP trackers are fundamentally different in operation from HTTP trackers, and HTTP is all that is needed for small trackers.
In other words, it's better to keep it simple.
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