QBIT TORRENT
Torrent your slice of Pi
Torrenting isn’t all about taking – Christian Cawley helps you use a Raspberry Pi to serve open source ISOs on the BitTorrent P2P network.
Credit: www.qbittorrent.org
OUR EXPERT Christian Cawley owns more Raspberry Pis than he has children. He spends equal time with them all, and his favourite is the small one that arrived in 2017.
QUICK TIP
As ever, you’ll get the best results from your Raspberry Pi if you set this project up on a fresh installation of your favourite OS. We used Raspberry Pi OS Lite.
One of the key strengths of the Raspberry Pi is its fire-and-forgetability. That key quality O where you can set instructions and let the machine simply perform the assigned tasks is incredibly useful; there is no chance of automatic restarts following unwanted updates, for example, or antivirus scans disrupting scheduled tasks.
Hook up some external USB storage and the Pi can become a data server (for example, a PC backup system, as in LXF310). A similar setup can be used in a different way: to serve ISOs to the BitTorrent network.
No, don’t choke on your pastry; this is entirely legal if you stick to files that are intended to be shared.
Is BitTorrent still a thing?
For people who don’t like paying for movies, music and video games, BitTorrent became popular around 15 years ago as an alternative to LimeWire, eMule and various other download managers. The focus was on copyrighted material, and the servers hosting the files were rightly taken down.
BitTorrent differed in method, which is why it is still used. No central server hosting copyrighted material can be taken down because none exists. Attempts to remove illegal hubs like the Pirate Bay have turned into a game of whack-a-mole (there are dozens of clones). Because BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer networking model is very efficient, it is widely used. The original decentralised internet technology, BitTorrent files are downloaded and uploaded to and from a network of computers, in whatever order is the most efficient.
Anyone who has heard of BitTorrent is no doubt aware of its illegal uses. But just as Kodi can be misused, so can BitTorrent. You don’t want to misuse a Pi-based torrentbox, so what can be legally served?
All manner of legal torrents are available, some of which are listed on specialist sites. The one we’re most interested in is LinuxTracker (https://bit.ly/LXF311- linuxtracker), which lists almost every Linux ISO that is available to download. LinuxTracker’s collection of BitTorrent trackers lists pretty much all the distros you can think of. Its main page is split between recently added torrents and the most popular ones. You’ll find everything from Linux Mint to CentOS, not to mention Raspberry Pi OS. So, let’s make Raspberry Pi OS the first ISO you serve with your Raspberry Pi torrentbox.