Tracking bittorrent downloads

Jun. 23, 2006

So, you want to get your Linux distribution or open-source program into as many hands as possible without spending a ton of money on servers or bandwidth. What's the answer? Most people already know the solution: BitTorrent.

Bittorrent currently is the most popular peer-to-peer, file-sharing network protocol around, and there are Bittorrent clients available for almost every operating system that anyone runs, these days.

Best of all, from your point of view, people are getting your distribution without you having to worry about the bandwidth costs.

There's only one little problem: you really don't have a clue how many people are actually downloading your distribution, nor who they are. To do that, you need a tracker.

A tracker doesn't -- no matter what the U.S. government, Sweden, and the MPAA may claim about Pirate Bay -- store any files. All a tracker does, is note the status of any given file. For example, a tracker can tell you how many people have successfully downloaded the file, how many are still sharing -- aka "seeding" -- the file, and so on.

Now, you could create your own tracker. The bandwidth requirements for a tracker are nothing like those of a traditional ftp site.

One popular open-source solution to this is the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) program,
PHPBTTracker+. You can also run this with an Apache server, to start your Bittorented application on its way to users.

If you don't want to bother with installing your own, LinuxTracker.org will be more than happy to track how many people have downloaded your Linux distribution.

There are other free sites, as well, that will help you to track just how popular your software really is. However, so many of these sites tend to go up and down like jack-rabbits on speed, that I can't recommend any of them.

Still, between LinuxTracker.org and PHPBTTracker+, I think you'll find most of your tracking needs covered.


-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols