aubrey

Honestly, I think it should be working. Generally, if things are not working, the http://bt.ocremix.org/ page won't come up. Or possibly, if you refresh that page a few times, you will notice that "Bytes Transfered" field isn't increasing. If the page does come up, and if the "Bytes Transfered" field is increasing than things are generally working for people. If things are working, but not for you (or anyone else with these kinds of problems), just pm me with your IP address and what date/time you were getting the errors. I can use that information to mine the logs and maybe find something useful about these problems. I have noticed that the eXeem 0.20 client seems to be braindead and doesn't handle virtual servers (which bt.ocremix.org is) correctly. So people using that client aren't getting the files for sure. But Azareus should. Aubrey

There are currently no plans for a super batch torrent. We may change how things are done when we get to 1500, but I doubt there will be signifigant changes before then. Now your other comment about the 1MB piece size is interesting. I hadn't noticed that the piece sizes are so large, but they surely are. I think your suggestion about using smaller piece sizes is a good one, and I'll be sure to bring this up with djp whenever we do revise the torrent files. Aubrey

You will get this particular error if you are using a very old bit torrent client. This error is the main reason why we split up the torrents into 500 piece sections. The official bt client for windows can't (or couldn't last year anyway) handle having more than about 500 files in a single torrent. I'd suggest upgrading your client to bittornado or azureus and your problem will go away. If not, I'd really be curious to know what client you are using and on what operating system. Aubrey

I don't know what the answer is for the ioerror 13 issue. It seems to me like the problem is with the client rather than the tracker. Have you tried a different client? The official client as well as Bit Tornado are both python based. Have you tried azureus? It is java based, and so may not have the issues you have ran into. Your system wouldn't be overclocked would it? I've had trouble downloading torrents on a mostly stable overclocked system before, but I didn't get ioerror 13s, just a lot of blocks failed the hash checks. Anyway, if you find something, please post your results. I'm about ready to update the FAQ on the tracker sometime soon. Aubrey

Are you still having problems getting these files? They work fine for me. I'd say it is possible that my server was down when you tried to retrieve the files. I've been working on retooling logrotate and have noticed that it isn't restarting apache correctly when it rotates the logs. So, I know the server has been unresponsive at points over the weekend. Having a mirror of those torrents probably won't do so much good as the tracker is located on the same server. So, if you can't download the torrents, you probably won't be able to use the tracker either. There is a backup of the torrents though over at supernova.org. Just (ignore everything else you see and) go to the music secion, then game music, and you can find suprnova hosted torrents for the four items we currently track. Aubrey

You mean if you moved all the songs you downloaded into another folder? Yes, you would still be able to seed. Just point your bit torrent client to the new folder when you try to seed. Aubrey

Answer: Because those of us that put the FAQ together hardly use Macs and noticed that the official Mac client seemed to download the torrents fine. I take it that means you are familiar with the other Mac clients that are out there? What would you recommend as the best one? Aubrey

Without manually renaming the files back, no. If you want to help, and have the space (2-4GB), I'd recommend just saving a copy of the ReMixes from the torrents into a new directory. Yeah, you will download another copy of the remixes, but if you are willing to help us seed the torrent, it would certainly be a benefit for us and everyone downloading the ReMixes in the longer term. Aubrey

My guess is that your bit torrent client was still running even though it wasn't listed in your tray. You could have checked that by checking if it showed up in your running processes list (on NT/2K/XP). As such, the files it was working with were still locked from access by other applications, and that's probably why you got the error you did when the second client tried to open a file for writing. I haven't ran into the exact situation you describe, but I have noticed that if I close shadow's client, the process continues running without a window for perhaps a minute or so before it really quits. If before it really quits, I double click on the .torrent file, I will get the same error you are seeing. Aubrey

Has anyone noticed that the torrents have been serving 2-4 megabytes per second today? Somebody must be feeling generous with their pipe (not me). I guess now would be a good time to download the torrents. Aubrey

Worst case...Try right clicking and doing a "Save Target As" of the link so that you can save the torrent to your hard drive. Then you can open it with your bit torrent client from there.

FYI, I'm formatting and doing some other heavy duty stuff to supertux right now. So, bt.ocremix.org and the supertux mirror will be down for a while until I get things back on line... For those interested, I'm switching the system from Redhat 7.2 to Gentoo. Should be interesting... Aubrey

Not as much as you would think probably. I've exposed the songs directory like a month ago, and remix web traffic went up from 17GB a day then to around 21ishGB a day now. It was serving about 10GBish day before the bittorrent initiative. I did want to see how much the traffic would go up if I exposed the songs directory I admit. I didn't even worry about it much because I do have an hourly cap on my site I still think the torrents are the easiest way to get the first 1000 remixes by far. Aubrey

I know I've been a bit slow to update the the http://bt.ocremix.org/ page, but I've finally done it. I think I've pulled out most all of the content from this tread and incorporated it into that page for all to see. If I made any mistakes, or if there is something I should add/do, please let me know while this task is still fresh in my mind. I'm impressed that we've served over 10 terabytes of MP3s via bit torrent already. For those interested, the traffic to http://remix.supertux.com has nearly doubled since the bit torrent iniative started. That is hardly the decrease in traffic we expected. I don't know about the main site's statistics though. Thanks, Aubrey

After a month of waiting and issues, I've finally had the bandwidth upped on SuperTux to 45 megabit! (5 & 1/2 Megabytes per second) Anyway, I've removed the bandwidth caps I had in place on my seeder, so now might be a great time to download the songs. I'll probably leave it that way for the weekend. Aubrey <- finds some twisted happiness in contemplating how to use the newfound bandwidth....

If I had to guess, I'd say that all the people downloading from you are using modems. In order to get around that myself, I bumped up the number of connections my seed will talk to to like I think 20.. The default settings allow for a maximum of 4 users to connect to you. If that is not the problem, please let us know. I have noticed that sometimes, even though the torrent has an overall high download rate, my home connection sometimes downloads the data at a snails pace, and I'm not totally sure why. Aubrey

I would imagine djp would add a link to bt to the goodies section except for maybe a few reasons.. like, it is linked to in the forums here, on the main page as a spotlight, and on each download remix page. And maybe more signifigantly, he is planning on unveiling the new site design sometime soon, so maybe he's just waiting to add it to the goodies section of the new site. Also, some of the first 1000 remixes were removed because of request, and or submission violations that weren't discovered until later. But just the same, the bt remixes are the ones you can still download from this web site. Aubrey

Dang, if you were only pumping out 1/10th, of your available bandwidth, I'm REALLY surprised that people noticed and complained. I usually only get in trouble when I'm using all the bandwidth for several hours at a time. <shrug> Anyway, thanks for helping out. From the numbers, it looks like the bit torrent initiative is quite successful with nearly 2TB put out in less than 10 days. Pretty cool... Aubrey

Hmm, I didn't test that client. The system I'm using here is also on 10.2.8, but I'm using BitTorrent 3.3a. I bet if you upgrade to a newer client, your issues will go away. http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download.html Aubrey

Bachus: I've used the official BitTorrent client for OSX and found that it could support downloading torrents with about 960 files just fine. As far as I was aware, only the official windows version (and those based closely on it) that had issues with torrents with > 500ish files... Are you just wanting a better client? Or are you having issues downloading the ocremix torrents to your Mac? cyber148: your client is downloading bits and pieces from all the songs randomly. Your client will automagically reassemble the MP3 pieces in the proper order once it is done downloading all the data via bit torrent. Just have some patience, and everything will work out. Aubrey

I wouldn't say frequent, but I'd imagine that there would be a new torrent every 500 remixes or so. Probably a while after that even as I would imagine DJP would like to 'lock down' the names of the previous 500 first, and that may take a while. That said, I'm just guessing. I do know from my discussions with DJP that he wishes that we could somehow use the torrents to serve mixes more frequently, but with the nature of seeders and such, I'm not sure how that would be easily possible. So, if any of you know about how bit torrent works and have ideas about how to serve more recent ReMixes via bit torrent, I'm sure DJP would be interested... Aubrey

Yes, well, we seem to have lost a number of seeders... I imagine they will come back once djpretzel does the more public announcement. In the mean time, I'd imagine the major benefit to downloading via bit torrent, is that you are guarenteed that whenever it is done, you will have all the songs. And bit torrent seems to be really good at recovering from net congestion/breaks and the like. Aubrey

One thing that I'd like to mention is that unless you have tons of bandwidth to spare, there is no good reason to try to seed both .torrent files at once off say.. your cable modem connection. This will likely just slow both your computer and internet connection down enough to where you'll quit seeding in no time. I think a more successful approach for cable/dsl users would be to choose only one of the torrents to seed and then seed it with Shadow's experimental client. With that client, you can then throttle the upload rate to something reasonable enough to where you can still use your internet connection for other things if you wanted. For example, if youre cable connection allows you to upload stuff at around 35k a second, you should throttle the upload rate of the one torrent you are seeding to be 20-30k a second max. Probably a good way of choosing which .torrent to seed would be to look at the tracker page ( http://bt.ocremix.org/ ) and just choose the .torrent that has the least seeds. Oh, one other thing I've done with my client is to lower its priority via the task manager from 'normal' to 'low'. This seems to make my desktop seem more responsive to where I don't even notice that I'm seeding .torrents. Aubrey

whiteknight: I have a feeling your questions have already been answered, but I'll give my two cents anyway. About a command line version of bit torrent: As ravve mentioned, just use the python source version of the official bit torrent client. That is what I'm using on supertux to help mirror these things. For reference, I'm using something similar to: ./btdownloadheadless.py --url http://bt.ocremix.org/files/OCR00001_to_OCR00500.torrent --saveas ./songs --max_upload_rate 100 > /dev/null 2>&1 & This will download all the remixes into a ./songs directory while specifying that I only want to serve 100k a second for the torrent. In my case, it happens that the ./songs directory is the same one that we use for the web mirror of the remixes. This was a convenient method to get all of my mirrored songs in sync with djp's collection. It turned out that about 20 of the songs that I have didn't match his collection exactly... but they do now. About the ports: The bit torrent client will try to listen on port 6881, then 6882, then 6883, etc as you start downloading the contents of .torrents. I'd port forward 6881 the other few you might use to your system running the bit torrent client. You only need to open as many ports as you plan run bit torrent clients for. Aubrey