@Keithius, UPnP may be nice if you trust all the clients on your internal network. What if friends drop by and connect their (possibly virus infected) laptop to your LAN?
Cool. I didn’t know about uTorrent acting as a tracker. That thing is tiny small. Oh, and there’s nothing wrong with pirate bay. It’s legit. The Pirate party is the 3rd largest political party in Sweeden. http://www.piratpartiet.se/storlek
I wanted to share a 200mb file once and it was a breeze with uTorrent using The Pirate Bay’s tracker.
I just selected the files, entered the tracker’s URI, gave my friend the torrent file uTorrent gave me, and that’s it.
LegalTorrents also offers dedicated tracking service on 3 separate networks for members. Once the torrent file is formed, the tracker needs to stay up for the sharing swarm to continue to function.
While it works slightly better, you don’t have to have any incoming ports forwarded to be the initial seed on a torrent. I’m also confused about what exactly you found so awkward about the torrent creation process, as the steps you outlined are pretty simple.
Yeah, as several other comments say, your roadblock was one that most sharers never run into.
Azureus (Currently called Vuze, unless it changed its name again), as a seeder, will actively connect to other peers - no need for port forwarding, although it greatly increases the sharing speed. Using a public tracker would also eliminate the need for playing with setting up your own.
I found it challenging the first time I wanted to share a file via torrent. After the first time, through utorrent, it wasnt so bad.
funny, i hate bittorrent. If a company offers something to download the company should put a server up and no asssuming that a user installs a client only for downloading something. Linux distris are worse with bittorent.
Hey Jeff,
I noticed you dismissed portforwarding with a comment about how complicated it is. But it’s not! Behold the power of people with too much time:
A guide to pretty much every piece of hardware imaginable with a step by step, screenshots included guide on how to forward ports! Even a computer dummy could do it with this kind of hand-holding 
Funny
OpenID -> BAD
Torrent -> WORSE
OpenID+BitTorrent -> HELL
I think a valid argument can be made for not having anything to do with The Pirate Bay or Mininova or any of the various other easy public trackers, because even if the stuff you’re sharing is pure as the driven snow, you’re still thereby connected with a wretched hive of scum and villainy as far as dumb lawyers who would like to confiscate everything in your house that uses electricity are concerned.
But then again, I’m unconvinced that sharing ANYTHING over BitTorrent is very much less “incriminating”, by the standards of idiots, who are so often the ones whose standards get to be applied. And it’s, of course, completely ridiculous if you’ve got lots of pirated torrents running all the time anyway.
I made a torrent of the excellent, and approved-by-the-creator-for-free-distribution, “Secret Life of Machines”:
http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2007/11/05/my-very-own-slom-torrent/
…and another one of a similarly-approved issue of “The Skeptic” magazine:
http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2008/04/01/free-magazine/
…and just used the usual pirate trackers.
I would not be surprised if The Pirate Bay hosts more legal torrents than LegalTorrents :-).
Seriously, use Azureus. I needed a way to share large backups quickly and quietly with my co-admins, I sat down with the Internet and Azureus and had the entire thing running without using an external tracker in about 30 minutes, without a hitch. Azureus is bloated by default, but the bloat is easily turned off and Azureus then runs like a dream machine with an amazing built in tracker. It uses uPnP (properly) and will find all the nitty gritty details for you. All I had to do was create a .torrent through posting my file to my internal tracker via a cute little Azureus wizard, email them the .torrent, and leave my computer on all night. Everything worked beautifully and at a pretty decent speed - though the Azureus friend option will help this along too.
I wish you would have more “coding” articles rather than articles like this.
Whatever happened to posting interesting programming problems and coding horrors?
Misgivings about running a client app as a service. It might behave oddly, and there have been a few security issues in uTorrent in the past:
http://secunia.com/advisories/product/13466/?task=statistics
If the user account is a nice, low-privileged account, perhaps even with file system quotas in place, less bad happen.
Just being paranoid. And hey! What happened to ‘orange’? 
What happened to orange, I can never get this right in first try.
I actually took some CS classes at NJIT with the creator of bittorrent (Brahm Cohen)'s dad. He, of course, taught Data Structures and Algorithms. He was a good prof.
Xiong, sorry, but saying rtorrent takes low resources is ridiculous.
My experience on an old PC:
X-less Linux (tried RedHat and Debian) with rtorrent (spent weeks trying different configs, asked dozens of people, etc), text mode only, nothing running but rtorrent, 300kb/s and I was at 100% CPU, not even telnet would work anymore.
Windows XP with uTorrent, 30 seconds of config, and I run a smooth 900kb/s at 20% CPU.
J. Stoever on June 4, 2009 3:01 PM
That sounds more like a problem with how Linux is configured, to me, if those numbers are from the same machine. rtorrent uses less than 1% CPU and 3.5% RAM on my 1.8 GHz Sempron with 1 GB RAM, with a constant 80 kB/s up on ~100 torrents.
Plus its written in Java, and we all know Java desktop apps are eeeevil.
3 points to that guy. he hit the nail on the head. java IS evil!
And uTorrent is lighter on the resources. Iv used both, and i preffer utorrent.
Can we start downvoting non-programming-related posts? I used to visit this blog every couple of days in the past, but I think from now on I will only stop by occasionally unless you return to blogging about programming. Come on, Jeff, a torrent guide? 
How do I seed a torrent to share my files if I can only afford a shared web hosting account?