Due to my recent attempts at stripping tracker URL's from torrents, I've been looking through lots of .torrent files. An interesting note is that many of these torrent files contain a tracker URL, an announce list, AND a set of DHT nodes!

Does the bittorrent standards allow for this? I think we should offer the ability to do something like that too. It might increase the effectiveness of DHT.

I cannot seem to open bittorrent.org to see DHT draft, but I'm not sure about that. I think torrent should contain either tracker(s) url or DHT nodes, not both. But again, I'm not sure. I'll check it out when bittorrent.org is back online.

jdong wrote:Due to my recent attempts at stripping tracker URL's from torrents, I've been looking through lots of .torrent files. An interesting note is that many of these torrent files contain a tracker URL, an announce list, AND a set of DHT nodes!

Does the bittorrent standards allow for this? I think we should offer the ability to do something like that too. It might increase the effectiveness of DHT.

According to http://www.bittorrent.org/Draft_DHT_pro ... Extensions
the nodes key replaces the announce key, so if you really followed the spec, this would be illegal.

We currently do not support this, and if there is an announce key, we will not load the nodes.

Ivan wrote:I cannot seem to open bittorrent.org to see DHT draft, but I'm not sure about that. I think torrent should contain either tracker(s) url or DHT nodes, not both. But again, I'm not sure. I'll check it out when bittorrent.org is back online.

You need to enter www.bittorrent.org

Ah, ok, if it's not legal then forget it, let's not get our client a bad reputation for dodging standards.

jdong wrote:Ah, ok, if it's not legal then forget it, let's not get our client a bad reputation for dodging standards.

Well, this seems to be more like a grey area :

A trackerless torrent dictionary does not have an "announce" key. Instead, a trackerless torrent has a "nodes" key. This key should be set to the K closest nodes in the torrent generating client's routing table. Alternatively, the key could be set to a known good node such as one operated by the person generating the torrent. Please do not automatically add "router.bittorrent.com" to torrent files or automatically add this node to clients routing tables.

They just state that a "trackerless torrent does not have an announce key", but in this case the trackerless torrent has an announce key, but we didn't generate it. I don't see any instruction to explicitly ignore this.

We do not generate these kind of torrents, it's either nodes or announce with KT, not both at the same time (Ivan solved this nicely in the GUI of the torrent generation dialog)

So in essence we follow the standard, and if we commit this, we are a bit lenient on torrents generated by other clients.